While browsing through wallpapers at interfacelift, I stumbled across a simple but very powerful program - Apophysis 2.0, a free factal based image generator. Get it from here You can also dowload these extra flames and gradients to spice up your images
Ok, install and fire up apophysis
. First of all, we'll go through the options.
I don't understand most of the stuff here, but JPEG Quality is pretty self explanatory.
The next tag, display, deals with the onscreen preview. You can explore the other tags if you want.
After this, we have to load some scripts which tell Apophysis how to generate its images. Click on Scripts > Open, and load any of the provided script. There are various methods for generation, such as spiral, symmetrical, etc. Play around with a few. Once you've selected a script, click the "Play" button to process it.
The various different flames in that script will appear in the left pane. Double click on any to see the preview. The timers in the lower left corner will show the time elapsed and time remaining to generate the preview.
Now comes the fun part
These four buttons let you tweak the bejezus out of your flame 
The Editor is the least fun of them, as we have no clue to whats happening. Just drag the triangles around to check out the real-time changes. The timer at the bottom will show time left for the main preview. You can also move the corners of the triangles to change their shapes. Right clicking on triangles gives options like Flip.
Gradient controls the colors of the flame. There are a number of presets for you to play with. If you want to add your own, click on the "Smooth gradient" button.
It lets you select any image, and picks up colors from that. Pretty cool
You would not notice that the word "rotate" is actually a button. Aprt from the shiftingthe gradient, you can also play with the HSV and contrast, as well as blur and frequency. Its the awesomeness :hap2:
Adjust lets you play with overall gamma and brightness. You can also move around and zoom in orout with the camera controls.
The best of them all, Mutate
The center image is your current flame, while the surrounding 8 are variations, based on the type you select from the "trend" dropdown. Clicking any of the variation moves it to the center, and the new mutations are based from this one.Lowering the speed makes the mutations stay similar to the original, while increasing it would cause a man who just become a father to call on his divorce lawyer.
Finally, after you've had enough, click on File>Export Flame to render the image. Tada, you're done!
hyeah: Lemme know when you guys get bored 
