Coming to the Mac App Store
Photo
Refract
It turns any photograph into a kaleidoscope, mandala, or fractal-symmetric composition — live, on the GPU, in seconds.
It turns any photograph into a kaleidoscope, mandala, or fractal-symmetric composition — live, on the GPU, in seconds.
Photo Refract turns any photograph into a kaleidoscope, mandala, or fractal-symmetric composition — live, on the GPU, in seconds. Load an image, drag a slider, and watch geometric order surface from your source.
What takes hours of manual layer duplication and rotation in a general image editor happens here in real time. The photograph is the raw material; the symmetry is the discovery.
What took hours in Photoshop takes seconds.
A custom Metal engine renders as you drag — no waiting, no render button. Click to place the center, drag to pan, scroll or pinch to zoom, two-finger rotate to spin the pattern. The center is the single most consequential choice in a kaleidoscope, so Explore Centers lays out a 3×3 grid to compare nine placements at a glance.
Stuck? Press Discover for a filmstrip of six full-preview variations — click one to adopt it, reroll for six more. Lock the mode, the segment count, or the center to freeze the bones and vary the spice. The looks you don't want to lose go into the Favorites Tray with a star: adopt one with a click, or export the whole set at once. Your picks are remembered when you reopen the photo.
Before the geometry, shape the source: pre-flip, pre-mirror, pre-rotate, and quad-exposure passes with six blend modes, stacked ahead of the symmetry engine for compound patterns. Undo and redo on every move.
Kaleidoscope — classic wedge mirroring, 3 to 24 segments, with twist, hue spread, and per-wedge phase. Mandala — radial repetition without the wedge mirror, for cleaner rotational patterns. Bilateral — two-fold mirror symmetry, the quiet, portrait-friendly fold. 4-Way Mirror — quarter-and-mirror for tiled, quilt-like structure. Hall of Mirrors — an infinite recursive corridor toward a vanishing point, with per-layer rotation for spiral depth.
A custom Metal engine renders the full composition as you drag — segments, rotation, zoom, twist, hue spread — with no wait between the move and the result. The preview is the render.
Export 16-bit, wide-gamut Display P3 as JPEG, PNG, or TIFF. A linear-light pipeline so every blend and fade composes correctly, and supersampled rendering for crisp edges even at high segment counts and deep zoom.
Your transform recipe is recorded to a shared XMP sidecar, so a refracted image can be reopened with its settings intact. No accounts, no cloud, no telemetry — your photos never leave your Mac.
Photo Refract reads the images your other tools produce and hands its results back. Open an export straight from Photo Developer, refract it, then send it back to Photo Developer for color grading with a single command. The transform recipe rides along in the XMP sidecar, so the work stays reopenable across the suite.
"In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order."
Carl Jung
Turn any photograph into a kaleidoscope, mandala, or fractal-symmetric composition on macOS — live, on the GPU. Five symmetry engines, a Discover filmstrip with locks, a Favorites Tray, and 16-bit Display P3 export. Coming to the Mac App Store. One-time purchase, no subscription. Requires macOS 26.2 or later.