RenderScript provides a few built-in functions, mainly dedicated to Image processing, called Intrinsics. With these, blending images, such as in Photoshop, blurring them, or even decoding raw YUV images from the camera, (see Chapter 4, Calling Java Back from Native Code, for a slower alternative) becomes simple and highly efficient. Indeed, Intrinsics are highly optimized and can be considered as one of the best implementations in their domain.

To see how Intrinsics work, let's create a new project that takes an input image and applies a blur effect to it.