quadrium | flame

quadrium | flame is an application allows you to create and animate "flame fractals". It combines a wide variety of mathematic transformations (going well beyond traditional techniques to include such things as strange attractors) with an interface designed to let you easily explore the vast realm of possible images, allowing you to literally "grow" you image. You don't need an advanced degree in math to be able to create rich and fascinating images, suitable for websites, presentation backgrounds, cards, CD covers, brochures, or fine art prints. You can even create animations, bringing your creations to life.

Features:

• Interactvely build your image
• Compose your images by combining 24 different transformations and attractors, including support for 3D transformations
• Live feedback as you directly manipulate the flames
• Warp your image with 37 different topologies, applied either globally or on a per flame basis
• Color both based on per flame color as well as gradient (and any combination of the two), with five different coloring schemes
• Full featured gradient editor
• Multiple 'layers' allows you to control what flame influences what other flames
• 'Traps' to add unique new special effects to your images
• Special 'fake 3D' effects to add depth to even your plain 2D images
• Mutate your image to explore countless variations
• "Breed" your images together to combine their features creating a new images.
• Fine tune your images by explicitly adjusting their various settings, or use the "tweener" to adjust large numbers of settings all at once
• Animate your creations, generating QuickTime movies (including high resolution movies)
• Render high resolution versions of your creations (up to 600 dpi with 4:1 anti-aliasing)
• Create AppleScript scripts to directly manipulate your image, allowing you to automate common effects
• Share your images locally via Bonjour, or globally via your .Mac account
• Create image workflows by post-processing your images with AppleScript or Automator (such as automatically adding to an iPhoto gallery, for example).
• Extensive documentation, including a 60+ page tutorial (over 150 pages of PDF documentation), and online help.
• Interface driven via "drag & drop", with unlimited undo and live feedback.

This release of quadrium | flame is designed to address several minor Leopard issues, but does not provide any Leopard specific features. It does fix several bugs:

• Crashing when navigating through view or mutation history
• Improper exporting of "with alpha" files (though it doesn't help when different apps treat alpha in TIFF files in different ways, so this may still have some tweaking to go)
• It also enhances the "transfer mode" for HDR1 files (so you can better compose images on the colored background).
• There is one major new feature - a new gradient editor which includes the ability to manipulate multiple colors stops, drag & drop to rearrange them (as well as drag & drop to insert a second gradient into the middle of one, or to drag and drop a color from the color panel to add a new color stop), more controls to change and adjust the gradient, including blending/tinting of a secondary color.

Note that this is still a beta, and there may be problems - use at your own risk.