Colour Mapping window

The Colour Mapping window is where you adjust how the fractals use the colours in the colour palette. Use the controls in this window to assign (map) the possible thousands or millions of different iteration bands in a fractal to the limited number (possibly a few hundred) of colours possible on your computer display. Each fractal window has its own colour mapping settings.

By increasing the mapping speed, you can map many adjacent iteration bands to the same colour. By increasing the mapping acceleration, you can map a few iteration bands to one colour for fractals at low iteration levels, but map many iteration bands to one colour at high iteration levels. By adjusting the offset, you can select the first colour in the colour palette to use. This is equivalent to cycling the colours in the Colour Palette window, except that changes in the Colour Mapping window affect only the current fractal window.

To open the Colour Mapping window: On the Options menu, click Colour Mapping.

Going from top to bottom the controls are:

• The Offset control adjusts the first colour to start with from the colour palette. This value is added to the index value of the leftmost colour in the Colour Palette window to get the first colour to use in the current fractal.
• The Speed control adjusts how many iterations use a particular colour index in the colour palette. The default setting (1.000) uses one colour per iteration. Decrease the speed to see more colours at a time or increase the speed to see fewer colours. This control can be used with Interpolate colours to allow fractals with thousands of colours.
• The Acceleration control adjusts the detail near the interior of the fractal by mapping several iteration bands near the interior (where there are several in a small area) to a single colour. Increase the acceleration to see more detail at the interior's edges. This can produce a sharper interior edge because fewer colours are being used.
• The Interpolate colours control specifies whether colours should be repeated or interpolated when speed is greater than one. Enabling this when speed is greater than one causes Fractal eXtreme to synthesize additional colours, reducing banding in the fractal. Generating extra colours only works when antialiasing is enabled.
• The Reset button is used to restore the default values in this window.

Note: Changing a fractal's max. iterations value changes the colour mapping when Acceleration is not set to one. This is because changing the number of iterations changes the size of the range over which the colours have to be accelerated. This can be very useful when searching for that perfect colour distribution, but it is rather disconcerting at first when your picture magically recolours itself after you adjust the iterations or zoom in (which automatically adjusts the iterations for you).