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| This first section is about BACKGROUNDS. If you render an image in Apophysis and save it as a .JPG, the background colour as set in 'Rendering' - 'background' will be saved too. You can set this colour to anything you like but it will be part of the saved graphic for ever. You may be able to remove it with the selection tool of a graphics program like 'Photoshop' but this is usually unsatisfactory. This image is a .JPG rendered with a blue background
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| Here, the same flame has been rendered as a .PNG It has the same number of colours but the important difference is that the background has not been saved at all. It was still set to blue as above but will be transparent. This means that when placed on a page like this, the page background shows through - in this case, plain black.
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| We can open the .PNG file in any graphic paint program like Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, Painter, etc, where we can add a new layer, move it down below the one with the flame on it and then add what we like as a background. In this case I have simply added a green fill. If I don't like it, I can easily change it until I find one I like. We can now save it as a .JPG, which takes up less disk space, and use it on the Web if we want. |
| But I can add anything I like to the original .PNG without affecting the flame fractal! Here is a radial gradient using a blend between yellow and orange. A simple gradient is often enough to make a drastic change in the picture. It can add radiance or menace, as can be seen in the examples which follow later.
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| You can go further if you want. Here I have added another layer in front as sea and made it half transparent so the 'creature' shows through. In no way have I altered the original flame. In the following examples, I try to show a varied selection of backgrounds. The first set of 15 pictures show different effects which are mentioned in the captions. Thereafter they are there for you to work out. Don't forget that the flame parameters are available in the parameters page of each picture. If you download and render them, don't be surprised if the backgrounds are not there - they are not saved in the .flame file.
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