De-Rezzed

One of the difficulties with digitally-generated art is that manifesting it outside its native on-screen pixels can present problems. Fractals, by their nature, have infinite detail, so theoretically they could be printed at any size and still retain perfect quality. This is more or less true, up to the limits of the artist's computing power and patience.

But what about images that aren't entirely fractal? The programs that generate fractals are usually capable of outputting large, high-resolution images for printing, but there are lots of other tools available to digital artists. Photoshop, for instance, can take a picture and apply all sorts of interesting effects to it, but at the expense of what one of my teachers called killing pixels: information is lost, colors mush and blur, image quality can degrade, and if the picture is subsequently enlarged, it may look terrible, or at least not like the artist intended.

So this is the dilemma of the fractal artist: stick to "pure" fractals and have the luxury of being able to scale up, or increase your aesthetic options with filters, and lock yourself into one size, forever? A frustrating state of affairs.

In the past, I've mostly stuck to the pure-fractal approach. For me, a large part of the appeal of these images is the infinite detail, the incredible resolution, the knowledge that each part of the whole is there for a precise mathematical reason. It's pleasing, the same way it's pleasing to look at the shape a plant makes as it grows, all the parts in their proper order and arrangement. But of course, all those post-processing filters are mathematical too. They are algorithmic even if not specifically fractal. So it should be possible to encode them along with all the rest of a parameter set, to be rendered at whatever size I should happen to want. As an exercise, I spent a morning working with mapping transforms in Ultra Fractal, to see if I could make some pictures that looked like ones I've seen that were made with filters.

Starting points: A page of notes on how to make one particular style of image. Various images seen around the internet. The collection of mapping transforms available from the Ultra Fractal formula database. And a simple fractal of my own, with nice colors but not otherwise especially exciting.

Because of the nature of the transformed effects, re-sizing the finished pictures into thumbnails makes most of them look like blurry versions of the original—the effects don't show up very well. So instead of resizing down, I've cropped them in (hopefully) interesting places. Click on any of the small images to see the whole thing.

The instructions in the link above said to start with Flaming Pear's India Ink filter. After some experimentation in Photoshop, it seemed like the filter mainly added black, fine-lined patterns to the original image. There were some possible color alterations as well, but it's easy to adjust the colors of the fractal natively in UF, so I didn't worry too much about that part. I thought the Gaussian Integer coloring method might give me something like the right look, so I added a layer to my fractal. The new layer had a gradient that was mostly white, with narrow, sharp-edged regions of black evenly spaced. By setting the Merge Mode to Multiply, and adjusting the Color Density, I was able to get a variety of effects that were similar to India Ink. I wasn't entirely happy with the results, but since I was planning to add lots of strong distortion in the next step, I figured it might not matter too much. The main thing is that I was able to add some areas of black to the image, which would help with contrast and visual impact later on.

The next step would be the Block Wave filter, only I don't have it. It's part of a photo program that runs on Linux, and since the only computers I have easy access to are running various versions of Windows or Mac OS, I'm out of luck. Looking at the results, though, I think I can do something similar. The file mt.uxf has a transform called Waves, so I applied it to all the layers of my fractal and tinkered with the parameters until the wavy bumps were a suitable size. It turned out that the black lines from my Gaussian Integer layer were getting too smeared out, so I reduced the Color Density on that layer until the distribution of dark stuff looked right.

Some of the distorted bits were interesting, so I tried zooming in to check out the details.

While I was at it, I thought I'd explore a few more of the available mapping transforms. I saved the parameters for my pseudo-block-wave image, removed the transforms and the Gaussian layer, and started again. This fragmented image is the result of a few minutes of messing with Shuffle, in mmf3.uxf.

That's pretty cool, but what if I want an effect that's more painterly, and less hard-edged? I think I'd need at least two transformations: one to break the fractal into brush-stroke-sized regions, and one to get rid of the sharp borders between those regions. I started with Mosaic (Fast) in dmj3.uxf, and then added Random Deformation from mac.uxf. In both cases, I changed some of the settings to get what I wanted: moved the Tiled Area Center in the mosaic, changed the Density and Magnification, and increased the number of tiles. The most important change in the Random Deformation was substantially reducing the Random Component so that enough of my original image would be left.

This detail zoom shows the effect nicely. It's not completely blurred out, but the computer-ish harshness has been softened a bit.

As far as I can tell from my preliminary tests, any of the above effects would work quite well at print sizes. But there are still things that won't. The Dithering transform in rdw.uxf is an effect that doesn't work if it's rendered at large printable sizes. In fact, even a regular screen-sized render will ruin the effect. The only way to keep the crisp pixelated look is to Export it at whatever size looks right. (The jpg compression isn't doing it a lot of good here, either, but the uncompressed png seemed a bit too KB-heavy for a web thumbnail.) For printing, I suppose I could resize it in a graphics program without using interpolation. (In Photoshop, that's the "Nearest Neighbor" option.)

Swap Meet, also in rdw.uxf, makes some interesting patterns, but all of the difficulties of Dithering apply here as well.

I kind of like the vibrating, out-of-focus effect in this one.

Not bad for a quick morning's entertainment. I think there's lots of room for me to try more experiments with this kind of thing; I've barely scratched the surface. Like the image import feature, I'm not sure if it's really my thing, but it's nice to know that the option is there if I ever want it.