In spite of your own creative misgivings about the inner workings of Apophysis.. this is a nice variation of Pillemaster's Circular Flame Tutorial.

Composition is strong. Colour palette is pleasing.

... ...

"All the time I worked on the layer mask I was thinking, "This is what I know how to do, but if I actually knew how to use Apophysis, I could get the same effect in less time.""

Time and opportunity permitting.. take a look at the Xaos and Color tabs for Apophysis. Just muck about a bit, even.

To get you started:

Tutorial - Xaos revealed

And..

Apo Tutorial - Color Symmetry

^ Introduces some of the controls via the Color tab.

To isolate the "problematic" transform.. check the "Solo" box, once working in the Color tab. Doing so, will render only that transform's.. erhm.. contribution (let's go with this).. to the overall flame.

Even changing the weight of the respective Transforms could work.. but, this comes with the caveat of; "it depends on the variation and transform".

That all said..

Nice work.

Sincerely.

I suspect I might have to reinstall that version of Apophysis because I stupidly let my laptop do a system restore. I hope there's nothing worse wrong with it, but it's old anyway. It's resting meanwhile till I can take a closer look. All these old renders, flames and other Apo bits are largely on the Mac, maybe even all of it, so there's that.

Thanks for the links -- I had no idea a transform could be isolated in that way. :-)

I really like the use of the color combination here Sandra, again you have done a great job on this render. tigs=^..^=