The minimum - though it's quite adequate - resolution you want for your prints is 200dpi. This is 200 times whatever the dimensions of the final print will be. So , if you wanted say a 20" by 30" portrait aspect print, you'd render to 4000x6000 pixels. If it was going to be 15"x15", you'd want 3000x3000. Some people go overboard with wanting 400 or even 600dpi but that's really not needed. As long as you've done a good high-pass or unsharp mask sharpen to your finished render, it'll be fine. If you are making a giant sized print, nobody is going to come up to it and stick their nose against it to look at it and look for tiny, nanomillimeter spirals. It will be up on a wall, maybe behind a sofa, and viewed from a distance. I think, as fractallists, we sometimes get all wrapped up in the "infinite" self-similar spirals and the precise minutiae - we're all closet mathematitians! lol - and lose sight of how the works will be viewed by Joe public.

Are you printing Apo or UF pieces? There are different concerns and things to take into account when rendering, depending on which you are doing. I don't know a lot about printing Apo fractals but I'm sure you'd have to at least SOME oversample and Filter Radius to get good anti-aliasing. I'm not sure an Oversampl of "1" will be all that pleasing in appearance, though you could render to twice or 50% larger size, resize smaller with PS or PSP to get an anti-aliased polish and then sharpen. I've never used flam3, just the internal renderer. I get by ok with a Filter Radius around "4" and an Oversample of "2".

With UF, there are different options depending on the nature of your fractal. I've found that if you have very fine, grainy textures that it's best to turn Anti-Aliasing off and render to maybe 50% larger and then resize. it keepes the grain that AA would smooth out. Typically, I use just "Normal" AA. Damien has advised me that if there are a lot of really fine lines to uise "Custom" and set the "threshold" to "0" so that the lines are sharp. You want to make sure you have adequate iterations and bailout so that fine, pointy forms don't have gaps in the lines or clip off square. We see a lot here where a pointed shape is clipped short from too low a bailout. Damien knows a TON about this stuff. I have an e-mail he sent a while back with lots of UF rendering tips. If he gets time to get out of the darn bedroom (he just got married a few weeks ago - lol) and see's this thread, maybe he'll weigh in. Or I'll try to dig it up when i get off work.

You can get reasonably close on your colors and brightness by running Adobe Gamma, which "secretly" :-) installed itself into your Control Panel if you have Photoshop. There are a number of more expensive solutions but I don't know if you'd want to blow a few hundred "bucks", "bob", "samollians, "pounds", "quid" or whatever (lol j/k) on that stuff. The biggest problems I had when I started printing was that the prints turned out a lot brighter than on my monitor - which was set for only 50% brightness - and areas I thought were black/very dark weren't and stuff showed up. A little note - multiply and the other merge modes don't totally black an area out. Neither does Normal with the opacity dimmed. You need to make mask layers to really get that stuff at the edges of shapes gone that you want black/very dark. and make sure that the edges of every mask layer for a certain shape/area is perfectly aligned with all the other instances of that mask layer in the layer stack. Positive AND reverse masks. I've found that you can tell how your print will look if you just print it on 8.5x11 with a laser printer if you have one at home or work.

Whew - I'd better get back to work and at least look busy - cya!

Rick