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About this tool
Explore Mandelbrot and Julia fractals with interactive zoom, color controls, and export tools
Fractal Explorer renders four escape-time fractals — Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship and Tricorn — on a canvas you can click to zoom, drag to pan and export as a PNG. Every pixel is iterated under z → z² + c (with the sign flips that define Burning Ship and Tricorn) until it passes the escape radius or hits the iteration cap, and the escape count is mapped through a two-colour gradient with optional smooth log-log shading. It is aimed at anyone who wants a specific, reproducible fractal image rather than a random one: the centre coordinates, zoom, iteration count and Julia constant are all typed in and visible.
Open Fractal Explorer on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Pick Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship or Tricorn from the Fractal Type select, then type exact Center X and Center Y values.
Drag Max Iterations (50 to 2000) and Escape Radius (2 to 20), and click the canvas to zoom in, right-click to zoom out, drag to pan.
Set Supersample to 2x or 3x, then press Export PNG to download the canvas as fractal-<timestamp>.png.
Mandelbrot, Julia, Burning Ship and Tricorn all share the same centre, zoom, iteration and palette controls, so comparisons stay honest.
Centre X, centre Y, zoom and iteration count are numeric fields, so a view you like can be recorded and recreated exactly.
Smooth colouring uses the normalised iteration count with a log-log correction, and 2x or 3x supersampling cleans up the edges before export.
Four: the Mandelbrot set, Julia sets, the Burning Ship fractal and the Tricorn (also called the Mandelbar). Julia sets additionally expose the constant c as separate real and imaginary inputs, which is what changes the shape.
Because the iteration cap is too low for that depth — points near the boundary need more iterations to be told apart the further you zoom. Raise Max Iterations, which ranges from 50 up to 2000 here; the built-in deep presets sit at 900 to 950.
It sets the modulus at which a point is declared escaped, adjustable from 2 to 20 with a default of 4. Anything above 2 is mathematically sufficient, but a larger radius gives smooth colouring more room and reduces banding in the outer rings.
Use Export PNG, which writes the current canvas straight to a downloaded file. For a cleaner result, set supersampling to 2x or 3x first so the render is antialiased before it is saved.