Color Gradient Editor

Fractals are colored by applying colors to the transforms taken from the color gradient Fractal Architect makes it easy to create new color gradients, use color schemes, and save the gradients for future use.

User Manual:Color Gradient Editor

Color Editor Workflow

Open the editor from a Fractal preview window

Do many times:

Modify the fractal's gradient and/or replace the gradient with another one.
Watch the fractal preview as you make changes
Add the gradient to the Gradient Stash if you like it.

Go back to the Stash and select each gradient one at a time, till you find the best.
Hit the Apply to Fractal Preview button - that saves the gradient to the actual fractal.

Gradient Color Stops

Gradients have between 2 and 256 colors in them. Fractals seem to look better with more colors than less in the gradient. A handful of colors leads to monochromatic images, where as having more colors leads to rich multi-toned fractals.

The top portion of the editor shows the list of color nodes and their RGB color values. Sometimes,you want to replace one color. You select the color node to change, then hit the color well to change the color.

9 Color Gradient Example

256 Color Gradient Example

Making Random Color Gradients

Pick from 2 to 256 color stops.
Select a color scheme to use (optional)
For the color scheme select the first color, play with the weights
Click the Create New button.

Easiest Way to make a new Random Gradient

Click the Roll Dice button!

Color Harmony Schemes

Color schemes can be applied to random gradients. The schemes available are:

None
Grayscale
Monochromatic
Analogous
Complementary
Split-Complementary
Triadic
Tetradic (2 versions)

Gradient Stash

Since it is so easy to create new gradients and apply them to the fractal, a gradient stash is provided to hold the better looking gradients (when the fractal looks good).

With the Stash, you can switch back and forth between selected stashed gradients, so you can quickly see which looks best. You can even save the stashed gradients to a file and load them in the future.

Random Gradient and Stash Example

Using a Standard Flam3 Color Gradient

If you bring your own copy of flam3-palettes.xml for Fractal Architect to use, then you can use one of the color gradients from the file.

Standard Palette & Gradient Stash Example

Modifying a Gradient

Modify using these operations on the color nodes:

Rotate the gradient color nodes.
Hue
Saturation
Brightness
Contrast
Red
Green
Blue
Blur the color nodes together.
Increase the frequency of color node changes.
Invert the colors.
Reverse the order of the color nodes in the gradient.