I partially agree and partially disagree with Wojtek. "You have to put some efforts,some skills,some artistic taste to an image". Of course, but this doesn't necessarily means that you must spend a year making it. And black backgrounds look prettier :) This thread seems to be linked a bit to some relatively old thread (also started by Keith I think) that said something like "are we making our images just for them to be at R's (or any other similar site) top 20 or are we trying to make images that are pleasant to ourselves?", and it is linked to Wojtek's message main theme as well, which is not "images must be multilayered to be considered good", but in fact it's how we can be lead to bad ways, if we misuse the tools we have and just trust on our luck. Indeed, we can really run the risk of destroying our own style and technique (no matter how simple or complex they are - I'm a fan of the "less is more" phylosophy though) trying to do images that aren't among our favourite things/techniques but that are "the top 20 of the week". I've reduced greatly my numbers of posts and visits to R to avoid being "infected" so to speak by these trends, when I felt that I was (unsuccesfully I must say) involutarily trying to "copy" some images and styles seen here. I personally have nothing against the "random" features most of the time, but I think I've read somewhere something about the randomizing algorythms, and how there isn't a real "randomizer" - things will eventually repeat sometime (I'm not a programmer, forgive me if I've said something wrong). I've used the Fractint's "Evolution" a lot, and it is a valuable tool. Sometimes there are really beautiful images that are found in the very first round (that may also have been seen by others, why not? Someone that has been playing with Fractint since 199? probably had the chance to see these same images by other methods), but my way of work is to usually import them into UF and use its better colorings/etc. etc. Sometimes, the tweaks are minimal, sometimes they are more elaborated. Sometimes there aren't tweaks at all. I don't think that the quality of the images here have decreased that much (maybe, I havent been here that much either), but instead, most of the artists are now in the same "level" of techniques - the "random realm" level.