Color Schemes Options
The Options tab of the Color Scheme allows the user to adjust some global settings of the final rendered image.
- Scaling Powers: This option allows you to alter the index to color curve that is used in selecting colors from the color palette. All color calculations are normalized to 0 - 1 before a color is selected. If this option is set to 1 then a color index of 0.5 will choose the color that is in the middle of the color palette. This option will raise the index to the input power before the color is selected. So if the power is set to 2 and the index is 0.5, the index will be altered to 0.5^2 = 0.25 before the color is selected, hence the selected color will be at 0.25 of the palette. If the power is larger than 1, then the smaller indexes are compressed and larger indexes are stretched, this gives the effect of spacing out the colors or the larger indexes. If the power is less than 1 then the opposite happens, the smaller indexes are spaced out and the larger indexes are condensed. When using an iteration color scheme and zooming in on a dense area (such as the body of a seahorse from seahorse valley) the colors change rapidly giving a static-like appearance, setting the power to a number less than 1 (say 0.5 or 0.3) will dampen the static effect and smooth out the color transition.
- Anti-aliasing Filter: This is an image smoothing technique that blends a pixel color with the colors around the pixel. This filter is applied after the image is completely rendered. In general, smoothing techniques from specific color schemes are the best method for smoothing images, but these methods do not always work for all fractal families. There are two parameters for anti-aliasing, the Level is the number of pixels around each pixel that are used in the blending calculation. So if the level is set to 1, each pixel will be blended with the 8 pixels that are one pixel around it. If the level is 2 then each pixel is blended with the 24 pixels that are within 2 pixels of it, both horizontally and vertically. The Center Weight value is the amount that is given to the pixel being blended. So if this is set to 0.3 then 0.3 of the center pixel color is used and 0.7 of the average of the surrounding pixels is used.