Product Reviews

Like the mullet haircut, fractals aren't really making a comeback; we've just stopped pretending they went away. These zoomable patterns are produced by simple equations with complex numbers that have a 'real' part and an 'imaginary' part based on i, the square root of -1. Various fractal programs are available for the Mac, including the shareware Fractal Domains (fractaldomains.com), but the point of PhotoFract is to do it within Photoshop.

First contact makes you wonder if it might be simpler to solve the equations yourself and draw the fractals on graph paper. We eventually got the gist of it by guesswork and email.

When you launch PhotoFract from Photoshop's Filter menu, you can choose Basic or Advanced mode. Basic is where you create fractals by picking an equation or a preset thumbnail and tweaking the result. Sliders make it easy to experiment, and dragging a rectangle over the preview zooms in, so you can ponder why, if fractals are infinite in their variety, they all look the same.

Computers have become a lot faster since the 1980s, when we had to leave our fractals to develop overnight, like bread dough. The preview updates in a second or two, although it's easy to lose track and click

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again during this time, which is particularly annoying since there's no undo as such, although the Last button sometimes helps. The final result is generated at the resolution of your canvas, and can take a few minutes for large sizes.

At the bottom left (unless your display is less than 832 pixels high, in which case you can't see it) is the gradient that colours the fractal, with an Adjust button to open a gradient editor. By pressing Recall (twice), you can load a set of predefined gradients, if you can get your head round scrolling through a vertical list using a horizontal scroll bar. Gradients include transparency, allowing any underlying image to show through, and you can also set the overall opacity and blending mode, although these don't match Photoshop's.

Thanks to these features, PhotoFract can claim to be a practical art tool, but a couple of other aspects belie this. There's no way to pan your fractal, and if you start with existing artwork, its size and position in the preview are messed up. This makes it difficult to align or integrate fractals with anything else.

The Advanced mode is common to various Human Software plug-ins, and provides a layered environment in which you can stack multiple effects, including PhotoFract fractals. It's ambitious, but fiddly, and in no way integrated with Photoshop. Any active selection is imported as a mask, which appears as 'channel 4' (after R, G and B), like a Photoshop alpha channel, but in fact has no connection to Photoshop's channels, which, like layers, are ignored.

PhotoFract is neither a serious fractal explorer nor an ideal creative tool, and if you use it for fun, you'll soon tire of the interface. However, if you're interested in using fractals in illustration, it's worth a look. Unfortunately, there's no demo version, and it's slightly too expensive to buy on a whim.