Image Tutorial - Apophysis JF by MichaelFaber

Oversample works best set to 2. Anything greater is overkill and unneeded. However, since you are scaling it down yourself, you could get away with Oversample = 1.

Oversample is how much larger the image is actually rendered. If you render at 3200 x 2400 and use oversample = 2, the program is rendering it at 6400 x 4800.

Filter radius is a setting for the Gaussian blur that is applied to the oversampled render. It is essentially the same as a photoshop Gaussian blur filter, which also has a setting for radius. This filter is applied to the 6400 x 4800 completed render to blur it. After this filter is applied, the system scales it down.

This combination of rendering larger, blurring, then scaling is to get rid of jagged edges. This is what you are doing in your graphics program by scaling it smaller.

The over sampling does not reduce grain or make the image look smoother (other than getting rid of jagged edges).

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The Quality setting affects how long Apophysis processes the date for. The higher the Quality, the higher more processing it does. This does effect the smoothness of the render.

Typical Quality settings are between 500-4000. Typically if you do not using any of the Blur variations, you do not need as much Quality (500 - 2000). Images with Blur in them can be rendered higher (2000 - 4000). However, 4000 is still very high.

If you are rendering at 10,000 and still have grain, there is something else wrong. For starters, some tutorials out there tell you to decrease the Zoom setting on the adjust window. I suggest keeping Zoom set to 0, as it does scale the Quality considerably. Please use the Master Scale instead.

The next thing to take note of is how much of the fractal is being cropped out of the window. If you crop out a lot of the image, then most of the data that apophysis processes is thrown out as it is outside the bounds of the image.

Something else you can look into is if there is a really bright spot somewhere. If there is something very bright, a lot of apophysis' processing goes into that one area, leaving the rest grainy.

Hope that helps.

if you have the latest 2.08, then you're good

You can get lots of help from people in #Aposhack

there should be a little window with 'layers', 'channels' and 'paths' tabs. go to the channels tab and click the little button on the far right. select 'split channels' from the list. you will now have one separate image for each channel.

the histogram is in another window with the 'navigator' and 'info'.