These incredible images are real, however they've been processed through a fractal filter. The software that creates these amazing images is called Fractalius, and the theory as to what the software is actually doing to the photos is far more mathematical than I expected! It creates a fractal, the boundary of a set of points in the complex plane, which is a result from computing Mandelbrot set images. The rest of the mathematics is way too intense, even for me, so we'll just stop there. Who new such elaborate mathematics could be utilized to create such eye-catching images!