Review: Amberlight 2

Amberlight 2 is the latest iteration of Amberlight, from developer Peter Blaskovic, the driving force behind Escape Motions' products. At its core, Amberlight is an app that enables you to generate abstract patterns that resemble fractal art based on particle field algorithms that you can manipulate, creating weird, unusual and often gorgeous swirling patterns.

Refreshingly, Amberlight 2 is confident enough about its allure that it doesn't have any extra features bolted on to try and increase appeal. It generates beautiful imagery and that's it.

The basic idea is you can control up to 12 fields that can repel or attract thousands of particles, and each particle affects another one. Amberlight makes it possible to manipulate the particle effects by altering parameters with each field in up to 5,000 steps, so you have plenty of options for how your final effect looks. There are modifiers, too, for adding variations and waves.

Editing the colours of the imagery is simple, with a slew of appealing gradients to click that instantly apply changes. You can also alter colours and choose whether or not to have the results against a background before you export them.

There's also a new Timeline panel that enables you to manipulate the effects with keyframes and play the animation. You can save it either as a sequence of images in JPG, BMP or PNG files (with alpha channels) or as a video animation in .MP4, .MOV and .AVI formats.

If you're looking for something to create genuinely unique sci-fi style effects that could resemble an inter-spatial rift or an ethereal nebula with ease, then Amberlight 2 is for you.