Information on the images

This site is gallery devoted to Mandelbrot and Julia fractal images. The Mandelbrot Set is probably the most famous fractal of recent times, and you may well have seen many images from this amazing fractal. To make mine a little different, I have used very different colouring methods than usually used. In some cases, the results are quite similar to the 'normal' way, but often they highlight very different, hidden, aspects of the fractal. Most of the images on these pages use original formulae, in some I have used other people's colouring methods as well.

The early images (galleries 1 to 3) have been generated using the famous Fractint fractal generator. To produce my own colouring methods, I have used the formula parser - click here to find out how I did this. Having generated them, I reduce the size in another graphics program and save as JPEG format. If you want to have a go with the formulas I use, you can download them at, surpisingly enough, the download page

In August 98, I started using the brilliant shareware program Ultra Fractals, which provides a much better way of doing these colouring methods, and produces true colour images. I am in the process of porting all my formulae into a few compact formulae in Ultra Fractals. These can then be used for any fractal type much more easily. I have re-done a few of the fractals using Ultra Fractals (porting the colour maps is currently quite time-consuming, so I won't do all of them). My UF formulae are also available from the download page.

Ultra Fractals allows you to combine many layers of fractals together, with various merge modes - normally I use the same image but with different colouring methods and colours. This really gives a much greater sense of depth to the fractal - I now find it difficult not to add more layers. Maybe this great improvement is because you're looking at more than one aspect of the fractal, so you're seeing more of the fractal information available

z squared plus c?

The Mandelbrot, Julia and Julibrot images are produced by programs using a very simple formula. The formula was used initially because it is simple enough to analyse, but not trivial. In fact the formula is used repeatedly (it is iterated). It if often written as follows:

There is the mandatory page on me for a start, and a download page from which you can get, for free, various files of my own and links to favourite fractal freebies. If you want to go back to the entrance page, click here.

While this site is almost entirely a Mandelbrot and Julia gallery, I have another fractal web site on AOL server's. It covers a much greater breadth of fractals than you can find here, including a Julia Morph page where you can get animations in the form of animated gifs, plus a Fractal Alphabet and a large links page.