Omino Glass: Refraction & Chromatic Aberration Pixel Bender Kernel from Omino
David Van Brink a highly talented and experienced developer released a new Pixel Bender kernel called Omino Glass 32. It does two things, but does it really well. It creates refraction and chromatic aberration.
Now the refraction part of the plugin isn’t that exciting to since there are a variety of filters that simulate the glass refraction. For example, Mac OS X itself has 3-4 Glass Distortion CoreImage kernels including the Glass Lozenge filter. But the exciting part is ofcourse the Chromatic Aberration part of the filter. It simulates the aberration using a distortion/bump map and takes into account the surrounding pixels too. It gives a lot more flexibility to the user to create realistic effects. Here is a sample test I did.
Omino Glass 32 is a free download along with its source code and is compatible with After effects CS4 and above.
Months before I released a free plugin called Separate RGB , which only helps you to separate the three components R,G,B of an image. Chromatic Aberration was one of the primary uses of that plugin, although it doesn’t do any real aberration nor atleast simulate it.
Now, I might also include a similar feature(or rip off the code !?) in the future versions of Separate RGB,which is also free and opensource, but it might take a while, since I really have no time to write any code right now!