I think with most people it comes down to a choice of two programs...Apophysis or Ultra Fractal. Apophysis is free, you download it, open it up, move the triangles a bit and you have a pic. Ultra Fractal - you download the demo, open it up and get totally confused because there are so many options to change. You spend a month getting nowhere with it and then you are reluctant to actually pay for it because you can't make anything with it. People have said before that the learning curve on Ultra Fractal takes months. With Apophysis it takes minutes. Being able to change 50,000,000 different parameters is great if you know what you are doing...If you don't then it's just daunting and frustrating. No wonder so many people are using Apophysis... Matt.