Hi Tony, - I've been a Tweaker, Zoomer and Mapper since 1995-6 when I first - picked up Fractint all those years ago. I started with FractInt in 1994, I think... I had a lot of fun using it. - In these Copyright Crazed days not as many folk are posting their - Par and Frm files as generously as they used to... So the problem - for an aging "newbie" like myself is to try to glean "how it was - done" from trying to deconstruct, analyse, and reverse engineer - Gif files that Fractint produces back into par files. If it's a FractInt GIF, it should contain the same information as was in the PAR. So if you have the GIF, you should be able to do as much with the image as if you had the PAR. - Apparently whether or not it's in complianceof some arcane - copyright claim re: the usage & generation of Gif files, or a - simple act of protecting one's own personal work from plagerism, - many web cruising Fractint artists now convert their work from - the "intelligent" venerable *.gif format to a "dumb" format like - a jpeg, from which you cannot glean anything or deconstruct to a - par file. While I am sure some people happily consider that a benefit of converting the images to JPEG, the truth is that a straight GIF -> JPEG conversion results in some pretty horrendous compression artifacts. If one is simply asking to strip off the FractInt parameter information it is much easier to load the GIF image with a program that does not understand the FractInt parameter block, and then save it again. This gives you a perfect, lossless image without artifacts but also without parameters. I find that a more compelling reason to use JPEG is when an image has been anti-aliased, to improve the image quality. The result of anti-aliasing is a 24-bit image, which doesn't fit well into the GIF format. It fits very well into the JPEG format, however. I think it should be quite possible to write parameters into a JPEG comment block but fractal software would need to know how to deal with that. - Here's my question to the still existing Fractint fans out there: - Can anyone suggest any other "learning methods", for analysing, - deconstructing and reverse engineering existing "finished" - fractint *.gif ( and possibly even jpeg) files? If you can deconstruct a JPEG or no-PAR GIF back into its fractal parameters, you probably don't *need* to do so, as you're already far beyond the skills of even the most advanced fractal spelunkers. :) When I look at an image for which I don't have parameters, I might try to guess the fractal formula first. Sometimes it's easy to spot Mandelbrot or Julia fractals, but not always, as those types of structures can appear in other fractals, too. But on top of that you have the issue of coloring--you might be able to spot the basic FractInt types, but what do you do when someone has coded a custom coloring type into FractInt? (Or even coded a 24-bit coloring algorithm with multiple layers?) You can try to reverse-engineer, but if someone doesn't want to share the parameters with you, you might end up being better off just starting from scratch and thinking of ways to achieve similar effects. What it really boils down to is being prepared to spend a lot of time experimenting. - Can any of the image files produced by UF be deconstructed & reverse - engineeered back into *.upr files? It's often harder to do this for UF images than for FractInt images because of the larger library of coloring techniques available for UF, which can often make it harder to discern the fractal type used. So basically, no, if someone doesn't want to share a UF UPR with you, it's going to be difficult to reverse-engineer it. Damien M. Jones \\ dmj@fractalus.com \\ Fractalus Galleries & Info: \\ http://www.fractalus.com/ Please do not post my e-mail address on a web site or in a newsgroup. Thank you.