The creator of the fractal concept, Benoît Mandelbrot, just died. Born in Poland, the great mathematician had both French and American citizenship and inspired millions of mathematicians and artists.

Rechercher des fractales sur Google.

You find them anywhere and everywhere, but it’s not always worth the visit. To find a beautiful wallpaper for your computer (even more if it has seevral screens), you need to find reliable sources of nice wallpapers. I wrote down a few of the best ones here:

• The wallpaper section of National Geographic
• Digital Blasphemy (an age-old good source)
• Vlad Studio
• Adolescent Eyes whose work is shown below
• Mandolux, a photographer very attentive to the use of his pictures as dual screen wallpapers
• InterfaceLift has an excellent search engine
• dualscreenwallpaper.com and dualmonitorbackgrounds.com for dual screen personal computers
• MintyWhite
• Social Wallpapering

A simple reminder, if you have multiple screens, your PC will appreciate your using DisplayFusion, the perfect software to handle corectly those large picture files. Like I do it with this photo of a rbown snake eagle taken in Kenya (backlit by the setting sun).

So, here are 10 minutes of total fractal travel:

The zoom is so intense that the original fractal is larger than the known universe, but the last image gives details smaller than the smaller of nuclear physics particle.

Astonishing mathematics via Boing Boing.

Most of it comes from the use of masterful algorithms of cleaning, cropping, re-cropping, aligniment, correction, optimisation that are usually included in some very complex and very expensive pro software scanning tools. Thanks to Scan Tailor, this is no longer the cas. It is open source and it does it all like the pros.

Use Google.

Now, Google is able to search images by size. Just enter your screen size and you will be treated to a galore of images. If you also search for the word “wallpaper”, you are sure to find exactly what you need.

For my own 24″ screen, I could find brightly colored pictures or elegant designs. All designed to be wallpapers, even when no wide-audience web site had found it yet.

did I mention that it also works for dual-screen wallpapers? And did I mention that it’s free? (for a commercial use, this would not be an acceptable practice)

You can notice that these images being free of copyright will allow to produce impressive posters if you agree not to make it a commercial venture. Idea?

Check his page often in the future. I believe that his future work will be worth it.

Look at the full set of the Windows 7 wallpapers. This is the upcoming version of Windows (after Windows Vista, it seems that Microsoft intends to switch back to a numbering scheme). Most of them may be colourful, but with very smooth surfaces where your icons will be appearing quite neatly and they offer a nice contrast.

So, I was quite interested when I stumbled upon the collection of pictures taken by the HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera installed on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Shooting photos of Mars surface, this photo camera brings extraordinary color images that provide nice patterns to be used as background for your Windows desktop (or even Linux or Mac desktop) and can be renewed quite regularly: Their catalog is available on the University of Arizona web site.

Furthermore, they provide an enormous resolution for their images which is a very good way to extract any size you may need for your extra-high-resolution background or to cover your 2- or 3-LCD display. Or even more. If you feel that there own selection of wallpapers is not enough:

• 800×600
• 1024×768
• 1152×864
• 1280×960
• 1440×1080
• 1600×1200
• 1920×1440
• 2048×1536
• 2560×1600

You can still stick to the original size (JPEG-2000 format images range between 0.5GB and 3GB).

And the good news is that there is no copyright restrictions, so you could do pretty much what you want with them: Really free desktop wallpapers.

You want an evidence? Open an image, save it in JPEG; Start over 600 times. The image deterioration will cumulate:

• An HP LaserJet 1005. The lowest B&W laser I could find at HP (I am faithful to this brand even if the last LaserJet 1022 failed suddenly far before the end of its normal useful life). It’s a Windows-based printer used on the local network, but it seems that printing over the LAN is nearly instantaneous. Magic!
• An Epson Stylus Photo R1900. Replacing an eon-old Stylus Photo 750, it should bring color photo printing in A3+. It’s amazingly silent.

Peter’s web site.

In most cases, when people follow this path, the result is quite predictable and there are a few compulsory forms (like the Mandelbrot set) that pop in the pictures. Please, check the admirable result of the example above. Stacey is able to create something that is clearly fractal and simultaneously bringing all the personal content that is the mark of the true artist.

Check all her work in http://intergalacticart.blogspot.com/, even if the updates are too few for our pleasure.

It was an impressive tool, it’s now a useful tool.

On the image on the left, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa has been converted to black and white (A), using color data and textures from a similar image (B), the algorithm built a color image again (C) not too far from the original (D).

Analyzing this work, I’d say that part of the differences between the result (C) and the original (D) come from the quality of the conversion to Black & White which led to an image quite hard (a bit more contrast than needed).

Impressive result on photos, you can expect to see it applied to moving images (and movies).

Source: Futura-Science.

Newsrooms are full of weird coincidences. For example, we just learned that  two products often presented as direct competition were launched this Fall. To my right, here is Adobe with its boxing champion, Photoshop, loaded up to version CS4. To my left, Linux and its community of free developpers pushing the challenger on the ring, version 2.6 of The Gimp.

I am still convinced that this is not an even fight (and Photoshop is favored by bookmakers, for those still doubting it) but both announces are interesting and should be reviewed shortly.

Photoshop CS4 is a new step forward based on the award-winning user interface that made it a best seller and on top-level performance. To this market reference product, Adobe adds the following image-edition-oriented features:

• Accelerated computation using the modern graphic cards coprocessor and the Windows 64 features (when available, of course), and many tools needed to support a 3rd dimension in graphics design (painting on top of 3Dmodels, 3D compositing, etc.)
• Several new tools
• Adobe Camera Raw v5 is improved again to include complementary tools applicabel to RAW photo files (local editing, gradual correction filters, etc.)
• Bridge CS4 is notably accelerated

On the other side, The Gimp is now available as version 2.6. Here again, improvements are notable, even if a little smaller:

• A number of improvements to the user interface (but I still thing that this is the weak point of this software program; Recommendation: Look into GimpShop which is a hack to The Gimp in order to make it appear similar to Photoshop)
• Improvements to the selection tool
• Improvements to the drawing brush
• 32-bit GEGL data management (perfectly adapted to keep maximum quality in 12- and 14-bit RAW files)

All this will probably start again comment wars supporting one or the other solution. But remember that The Gimp is simply free. On the contrary, Photoshop CS4 (even if getting the upgrade license and despite the many available options) will still be very expensive (Master Collection at $2,499).