Critique of fractal art

[David Makin]

As far as what's technically possible is concerned I've recently added some simple image processing classes to UF - as has Ron Barnett (reb).

Mine are simple whole image changes like gamma etc. that are applied via a chosen colour parameter and a merge mode and Ron's are more image/pixel oriented.
I intend to add options so Ron's plug-ins can be used in my formula but for now here's an example - just load an image into the image parameter and then play with the processing options using the parameters in the adjustment layers section/s.

Code:

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[Alef]

If compared with it's clone Chaos Pro in UF cleraly it is much more easy to explorer watever coeffitients, especialy complex and julia seeds and layering is integral part. It works much smoother, less bugs. But it don't have native 3D and you can't go throught all the gradients by two clicks. Well, and pluggins are evil feature with only programmers knowing how to use them.

There were some pretty cool fractal pictures and gifs using images.

There are UF implementation of Fractal Explorer colour methods, of them "log counting" and especialy "orbit counting" are pretty good. But without special Fractal Explorer colour features, such as using 3 channels independently (I supose. Hadn't seen the sources, but multidimensional effects like that can not be made without many channels, throught you can use layering).
http://www.fractalforums.com/ultrafractal/fractal-explorer-colour-methods/

Well, almoust certainly in UF or its Chaos Pro clone you can't implement colour palette (map) generated as wave function of 3 channels. I kind of like this feature becouse no matter how much there are map files, allways it is not what you want. But random number generator allways generate something uncontrolable with unnatural exess of blue.


* * *
About the youtube videos. I noticed that you will get many watches if idea of your video is good even if not so great visualy. This is weak point of most fractal videos.

* * *
In deviantart there were too fractal images entering most popular in 24 hours.
One is Apophysis (but Apophysis is boring): http://apofun.deviantart.com/art/Fleur-Translucide-337044830
Other are Mandelbulb3D: http://grahamsym.deviantart.com/art/Metallic-Swirl-336832046

* * *
Here are example, what can not be done with single channel maping and without layering. You just can't get colours crossing.

[Alef]

Here is another one. Probably all hypnotic images are made like this.

[David Makin]

But without special Fractal Explorer colour features, such as using 3 channels independently (I supose. Hadn't seen the sources, but multidimensional effects like that can not be made without many channels, throught you can use layering).
http://www.fractalforums.com/ultrafractal/fractal-explorer-colour-methods/

Well, almoust certainly in UF or its Chaos Pro clone you can't implement colour palette (map) generated as wave function of 3 channels. I kind of like this feature becouse no matter how much there are map files, allways it is not what you want.

Actually you're wrong - UF has direct colour mode which can use RGBA individually, that's what the "color" variable type is for - direct mode is not used as much as it could be because if the standard UF gradient is used in some way as source colour specification (or indeed to specify up to 400*4 float values from 0 to 1 to be used for any purpose) then changing the gradient requires a complete re-render of the layer concerned, but then again FE also has to re-render if you want to change the colouring
Although I agree that I was a little over-enthusiastic about UF's potential with respect to Maya, Photoshop etc. it is most definitely true that UF could reproduce *exactly* anything done in FE, it just requires the correct colouring algorithms to be written - and doesn't even require the newer class-based "plug-in" formula method to do so.
I wish I could remember who it was who had the source for FE because with that the FE colourings could be transferred to UF by any formula authors interested in doing so.

Also for the "colours crossing" examole - this is possible in UF for specific custom colourings using the old-style .UCL files but UF could actually be made far more versatile by writing a newer class based colouring that takes 3 (or more) normal plug-in colourings each applied to a separate channel - this would give you any plug-in colouring for red, any for green, any for blue and each could be based either on portions of the gradient or user-defined colour parameter values or even values from an imported image.