In my spare time, I’ve taken an interest in digital art, especially fractal art. From there, I learned about Ultra Fractal, and later Apophysis. My interest in artistic endeavours later spread to photography with the purchase of a Canon Powershot A95.

I have deviantArt and digital blasphemy to thank for getting me interested in digital art. The former for the unlimited free webspace allowed (a novel concept at the time), and the latter for making me think, “I can do better than that.” Thus, I found a fractal program and got busy.

Since then, I’ve created several prints and made enough money to buy a couple pizzas. By no means is this a day job-I’d starve-but it is an opportunity to create beauty.

Digital Editing

There are tools every artist uses; from the fractal artist, the photographer, the photo manipulator, to the guy in his mom’s basement making anime wallpapers; they all use Adobe Photoshop or the equivalent. At $600 per copy, it’s usually pirated by individuals, while major companies may own a few licences. It’s cheaper to buy a computer than it is to put Photoshop on it. There are several free alternatives, of course; Paint.NET and GIMP are both solid applications.

A free program I strongly reccomend is Neat Image. It’s designed to remove noise from photographs, but I’ve found great success applying it to fractal art.

Fractals

Apophysis 2.0 (free) is my almost-exclusive fractal program of choice. While it doesn’t have the excellent render times of Ultra Fractal 4.0 ($59 or $129). Large prints take up to a month to render in Apophysis, but they are much more beautiful and organic than images generated in Ultra Fractal. Price was also an important part of that decision.