I finally got ApoMap to make custom gradients, because I'm tired of almost never having the "right" gradient. Up til now, I've been using Paint Shop Pro to make an image with the colors I wanted and smoothing the colors in Apophysis. That works about half the time, but I wanted more tweaking ability.

I also got the Map Converter to compile the .map files into .ugr format. Since there's no way to upload them here, I'll be uploading them to my Deviant Art account, emilymhanson, under fractal resources.

emilymhanson.deviantart.com

I assume you tried the "smooth palette" function of the gradient tab .. granted it doesn't give you any control to write home about

feed it a picture and it spits out a gradient .. "Smooth Palette" is not the best name for the function

It may not give you a lot of control but you can get some killer gradients from pictures in the public domain. I've done it for a long time.

Though I'm a little clueless as a new name for the function.

How about 'Random Palette'? LOL. Definitely, I've tried the Smooth Palette function and was less than impressed. I really like ApoMap. It gives you much better control over the colors. You can adjust things like hue, saturation, brightness, frequency, blur, even the colors themselves.