Hi, metalgirl! Welcome to the fractal deck on the good ship Renderosity! lol My favorite fractal programs are Ultrafractal and Xenodream. They aren't very expensive and make great images. Ultrafractal is very versatile with the best control over coloring out there, With it you can create layered composites of many different fractals and can do some neat stuff with masking, textures and merging. I haven't used Xenodream, yet - the thinking involved with learning a new program might hurt my tiny brain so I'm procrastinating. lol I really like the images I've seen made with it. It can make some cool, painted jewelry looking shapes with great metallic textures that I've seen on the pages here. The Apophysis freeware program is real good - but addictive, so be careful! lol You can export Apo "flames", as they are called, into UF as layers for compositions and mess with the colorings, zoom or move them around once in UF. Rick