Chromebook delivers the decisive curve ball at last.

It’s been a long trip, but thanks to Android apps Dick can close the lid of his Windows laptop forever

It’s been 16 months since I abandoned my ThinkPad for a Chromebook, and the adventure has gone well – with a sole exception. Regular readers may know that a pastime of mine is creating computer art, and for the past 12 years this has consisted of taking photographs; some posted to Flickr straight, but others modified to look like paintings using Photoshop Elements.

These modifications depend heavily on Photoshop’s layers, which I duplicate, filter and re-merge over and again until the visual result pleases me. My discovery of Silver Efex Pro – part of the Nik filter suite Google that so magnanimously gave away – was a leap forward as its “structure” parameter gives great control over the levels of detail in a picture. However, regular readers may also know that Chromebooks don’t run Photoshop (except for Express, which won’t do for my purpose).

I’ve tried Chrome OS photo editors such as Photosuite and Pixlr, which have layers, but the only one that clicked was Sumo Paint. This looks a bit like Photoshop Elements, and has some fills, distortions and filters that at first I found a bit over the top. Then one fine day I tried its Fractal Morpher filter and found a new hobby.

All Fractal Morpher does is take a simple line drawing and project it into a complex fractal figure around symmetry axes you can vary from one to 16. These aren’t the shiny, 3D objects and scenes of so much online fractal art, but are strictly 2D – what grabbed me about them is their gorgeous curvature.

It’s not surprising that a fractal algorithm should produce curves that are attractive, because so many curves in nature are produced by similar “algorithms” executed by animals’ and plants’ metabolisms. That sunflower seeds are arranged in spirals described by the Fibonacci series is old news. D’Arcy Thompson described all this 100 years ago in On Growth and Form; Alan Turing did some of the maths, as did the Russian Ilya Prigogine; in 1990 Prusinkiewicz and Lindenmayer, in The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants, even extracted some of these algorithms and recreated them in C++ .

Since we’re animals too, why wouldn’t our brains prefer some curves over others? Modern artists I love – Picasso, Miro, Klee, Kandinsky, Malevich – all drew curves that are “right”, in the sense that they could once have been alive, while many artists I like less draw “bad” curves that couldn’t. Fractal Morpher produces curves that are right.

And so I started making crude but highly coloured line drawings, feeding them through Fractal Morpher and then applying my layering techniques to produce abstract paintings so psychedelically detailed that they look like they might have taken months to do, but in fact took minutes. There’s a fair selection on Facebook at pcpro.link/289face.

Ideliberately use the word psychedelic because these images, as well as seeming “natural”, display a deep complexity that resembles the hallucinations produced by LSD. (And yes I did, back in the 1960s, and no, I don’t nowadays.) This too is hardly surprising because LSD works on the human perceptual system, which is made up of neurons – in the eye’s retina and the visual cortex – that grow and connect according to rules similar to those that govern sunflower seeds or snail shells. There’s a good article by Jennifer Ouellette in Quanta Magazine ( pcpro.link/289lsd) about the maths of acid hallucinations. Basic shapes like lattices, cobwebs, honeycombs, spirals and tunnels recur because they reflect connection patterns in the retina and visual cortex, where they are components of the mechanisms via which we dissect and analyse perceived scenes. Our brains don’t work with Cartesian coordinates like a computer screen, but more organic forms.

So I must now be entirely happy with my graphical facilities on Chromebook, right? I wasn’t quite, because Sumo Paint lacked several of the blend modes available in Photoshop I used a lot, and also the Nik filters. Then came that upgrade to Chrome OS that let me run Android Apps, and that enabled me to use Snapseed: a photo editor with a unique and intuitive UI designed for finger use on phones and tablets. And, oh joy, several of its built-in filters replicate the actions of Silver Efex Pro, in particular that key Structure parameter. The result? There’s now almost nothing that I need a Windows machine to do, which feels liberating.

These images, as well as seeming ‘natural’, display a deep complexity that resembles the hallucinations produced by LSD