Palettes

Palettes

Fred's palette is displayed in the toolbar palette widget. The arrow buttons allow you to 'rotate' the palette one color at a time. You can drag the palette with the mouse for rapid palette rotation. This can be quite psychedelic. Note that the first color in the palette is reserved for the background color and it is unaffected by palette rotation. When the current image contains several smallish Mandelbrot set interior cardioids, I like to rapidly rotate the palette back and forth by dragging the mouse over the palette widget. Because the Mandelbrot interior points are displayed with the background color, they will be the only things on the screen that remain stationary during rapid palette rotation. In fact, this can be a way to spot interior points when they are hard to see on a busy image. I am easily amused.

Colors are displayed in Fred's Fractal Viewer by mapping the Mandelbrot Escape Count to indexes into the 256 color palette. The indexes into the palette range from 0 to 255.

The 0 index is reserved for the background color which is used to paint the pixels with an Escape Count >= MaxIterations.
The default mapping for pixels with an associated Escape Count < MaxIterations: palette color index = (Escape Count % 255) + 1 .

Other supported mappings from Escape Count to palette color index are described in Escape Transforms .