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Photo Morphing software

A

amccallum1

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 6, 2009
27
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Years ago, photo 'morphing' software was all the rage. You'd take a photo of your mother, for example, and a photo of a cat, draw bounding points on both, and the software would churn out a n image of a compound mom-cat -- or several of them in graduated progress between mom and cat.

I guess the same principle is used in animation software to produce a series of frames between any two (or more) static images.

I haven't thought about it in ages, and just googled "photo (morph,morphing) software mac" with no good results.

Surely morphing hasn't been un-invented; with today's powerful computers, morphing software should be easier to run and more attractive than ever. What's happened to it? Has it become a plug-in for Photoshop? A standard feature in other editing software?

Any pointers gratefully received....
 
xStep said:
I'm curious: What was "no good" about the four results in your search?
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Thank you for your curiosity. The standard and correct reading in English of "with no good results" is that there were no results that were good, not that there were results that were 'no good'.

The results were not good because they were sparse. As I'm sure you have found, software tends to generate discussion across the internet in proportion to its potential usefulness and perceived quality, as users post reviews and ad-hoc comments about aspects of its functionality. The software that my search revealed had barely been discussed; the few mentions and/or reviews tended to be obvious puff-pieces written by or for the producers themselves.

I tended to conclude that -- as The Bad Guy seems to have confirmed -- the software was all such utter crap that nobody could find anything worth saying about it. Unfortunately though, nobody could even be bothered to say that.

That is why the results of my search were not good: they were inconclusive -- insufficient to help me get a sense of the usefulness and quality of the software that it revealed.

Thank you The Bad Guy for contributing.
 
Norkross Morphx is like a couple of bucks in the MAS. Nothing special, sorta like a QT version of an animated GIF. If you want just a still image, then layers and masking in any graphics program should do the trick.

A more pro app is Morph Age by Creaceed; they have a demo. I use some of their other software and it's quite good (HDR software and scanning/deskewing software). There might also be some apps out there.
 
I used Norkross Morphx to create a movie of my son growing from infancy to adulthood using a sequence of photos of him sitting in the same chair over the years. Worked fantastically and easily worth the $2 cost. I'd gladly have paid much more.
 
amccallum1 said:
Years ago, photo 'morphing' software was all the rage. You'd take a photo of your mother, for example, and a photo of a cat, draw bounding points on both, and the software would churn out a n image of a compound mom-cat -- or several of them in graduated progress between mom and cat.

I guess the same principle is used in animation software to produce a series of frames between any two (or more) static images.

I haven't thought about it in ages, and just googled "photo (morph,morphing) software mac" with no good results.

Surely morphing hasn't been un-invented; with today's powerful computers, morphing software should be easier to run and more attractive than ever. What's happened to it? Has it become a plug-in for Photoshop? A standard feature in other editing software?

Any pointers gratefully received....
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I used Multiple Face Morpher from PCWinSoft for a video of myself from childhood to adulthood and the program had the option to automatically center faces basically did it all alone optimum work. I was satisfied.
 
Since this thread is revived, I'll just say that Norkross Morphx for the Mac is no more. It was a 32-bit app. Luckily I still have an old Mac I can run it on. Morph Age, mentioned in this thread, is still available at $50. I haven't tried it.
 
I remember reading this thread when it first was posted with some slight interest and thinking to myself, why wouldn't you just use a simple video editor, like iMovie to achieve this? it's free and easy to add a series of images with dissolve transitions to achieve this effect of morphing from one image to the next. That thought still popped up when I saw this resurrected!
 
Morphing is not the same as a dissolve. The image goes through a distortion process going from one image to the next. It's much more striking than just a dissolve.
 
talmy said:
Morphing is not the same as a dissolve. The image goes through a distortion process going from one image to the next. It's much more striking than just a dissolve.
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There are different dissolves available, you can achieve exactly the same skewing that morphing achieves in a simple video editor, especially if you explore the Flow features!
 
Looking into this, I can see articles where they are trying to smooth jump cuts. But this isn't the morphing I'm after. Points need to move into position. It's not a simple blending process People are saying to use special software outside of FCPX to do this. Here's my wife and I with two pictures at the same location taken 37 years apart. I really want that Morph effect, nicely done with a $2 now abandoned utility.
 
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talmy said:
Looking into this, I can see articles where they are trying to smooth jump cuts. But this isn't the morphing I'm after. Points need to move into position. It's not a simple blending process People are saying to use special software outside of FCPX to do this. Here's my wife and I with two pictures at the same location taken 37 years apart. I really want that Morph effect, nicely done with a $2 now abandoned utility.
View attachment 933223
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That's a gorgeous use of morphing, investigate the Flow Transition available in iMovie and FCPX, they do create that same morphing effect! I did it so our cat turned into one of our dogs and it worked a treat!

If you have access to a version of MacOS 10.2 or earlier and FCP, there is a plugin still available to do this for you!

Otherwise, in later versions of FCPX it is included as the Flow Transition.
 
OK, I tried it but it really doesn't work as well. (Excuse the aspect ratio problem, I was in a rush to reply and didn't set the project up correctly). In Morphx you can specify points to match in both images, like eyes and hands, and the morphing process distorts the intermediate images to match. The Flow Transition doesn't give as much control. My wife and I are very obviously replaced with older versions of ourselves rather than flowing from one to the other.
 
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talmy said:
OK, I tried it but it really doesn't work as well. (Excuse the aspect ratio problem, I was in a rush to reply and didn't set the project up correctly). In Morphx you can specify points to match in both images, like eyes and hands, and the morphing process distorts the intermediate images to match. The Flow Transition doesn't give as much control. My wife and I are very obviously replaced with older versions of ourselves rather than flowing from one to the other.
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Do you perchance have an older Mac, pre Mac OS 10.3 to try the plugin with? Otherwise it looks like it would need a tracker/warp feature in combination with the Flow Transition. Then you could do the same thing, pinning certain points.
 
No Mac that old, but I do have several older Macs (minis I use as servers) that will run Morphx. So I'm still good. And Morph Age is still around. Pricy but apparently very good. I don't have it.
 
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