If you are using a mac then a really wonderful application to checkout (especially if you catch one of their special offers) is the "Amberlight" (from Escape Motions). They have also a number of other tools that are equally as useful such as Flame Painter.
You can use the tool to create intense fire themed backgrounds as well as overlays as well as abstract art that can be quickly added as a pattern or used as a source for new brushes as well as just great images for your work.
You can find out more about the tool, as well as download a trial version, via
http://www.escapemotions.com/products/amberlight/index.php
The above image was created in Amberlight and then has been manipulated in Adobe Photoshop CC by combining multiple layers from the Amberlight application and then adding an oil paint filter effect as well as a color lookup adjustment. All kinds of interesting variants can be created using those filters and others in Photoshop. All you have to do is import the PNG etc file from Amberlight into Photoshop via the place command (or into tools such as Affinity Photo). Amberlight has a few nice features such as blurs and glows but to really add many amazing image effects then tools such as Photoshop and Affinity Photo really help.
Amberlight has a layer system but to be honest I have never worked out to get much from it and the blending modes are only limited to darken and lighten and normal so to really stretch the generated imagery then I always just create single images in Amberlight and then import them into Photoshop etc and use the blending modes as well as adjustment layers and effects there to create combinations of images.
Amberlight is fairly instinctive to use with a set of fields that can be edited and moved to create endless variations. It also comes with a nice random feature (something all apps and filters should have) to re-generate settings in numerous ways. You can also mix in gradients as well as change the color of the artwork in infinite ways. The render feature is more like a 3D app and you can generate fairly interesting works after 100 or so steps but to get the full image you have to let the render run through all 5000 steps.
One feature that I really like (and would love to see in all apps) is the tile feature which creates a lovely seamless tiled image which can be then imported into Photoshop etc and used as a pattern.
OK, what would I love to see more of in Amberlight ? First, Animation is a key one for me (especially to combine it with After Effects) The ability to animate the fields etc over time (perhaps the gradient and color etc as well) and then save the output to MP4 etc or a MOV file. OK, you can do this manually just by creating a subtle shift over time but a timeline would be great. Also a few more unusual blending modes would be nice such as difference and also the ability to transform and duplicate and create new layers other than just adding an image or two.
You can also find more of our tutorials about tools such as Amberlight on
http://www.graphicxtras.com/tutorials.htm
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