Morpheus Photo Animation Suite Mac v. 3.00

Reviewed by Robert Pritchett

Introduction

Morpheus Photo Animation Suite is an award-winning graphics program that lets you create animations of photos or movies morphing from one to another, being warped and distorted, or create mixes of characteristics from two photos. Morpheus Photo Animation Suite lets you create morphs in Flash SWF, Animated GIF, AVI, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, and other popular formats.

The all-in-one animation suite includes Morpheus Photo Morpher Mac v3.00, Morpheus Photo Warper Mac v3.00, Morpheus Photo Mixer Mac v3.00, as well as all 15 sample morphs, warps, and mixes.

The Professional edition lets you create higher quality animations and supports additional output formats. All Standard features are included with the Professional edition plus additional features such as:

• Line tools, transparency support, key frame options, and fade options used to create more advanced animations
• QuickTime output for use with 3rd party movie software

Getting Started

It is easy, fast, and fun to use for both beginning and advanced users. There is a beginner mode and tutorial to help you get started quickly. Sample morphs come included as well, which can be used as another way to quickly learn the program.

There are three tutorial sections in the Help Menu for morphing, warping and photo mixing and the steps are basically the same; Load pictures, “Add Dots”, “Adjust Dots”, preview and render and either use Key Frames or use “Fading Dots”.

The square dots are basically anchor points to lead the bits from one picture to another. The more dots, the smoother the transformations.

The first time I ran it I did so many dots, the system began reusing the same colors for the dots and when I began removing them the program poofed on me and I had to start over.

The file is saved as a .aml file. To view the file, either click the Play button, send it to Email, or “Render Timeline” to export to video formats for Internet or Email.

I saved it as a QuickTime movie and as an animated .gif.

Would I pay extra for the Professional version? Only if I wanted to get crazy with control.

Look at these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dc8wkorJ9Fs

http://www.namepuzzles4kids.com/morphing.html

And this is way cool –

http://i77.photobucket.com/albums/j64/Beenzon-Toste/Animations/Bairnsinabox.gif

See how “Dr Robert” morphed his CAD drawing into a real object –

http://www.ultimatecharger.com/satellite%20system%20conversion2.gif

Conclusion

This is quick&dirty morphing form the Windows environment ported to the Mac. It only took 4 years to go from the question to actualization of bringing this app to the Mac.

Recommendation

You can download the Morpheus Photo Animation Suite for free and try before you buy. I would like to see more of the “Dr Robert”-like renderings myself for professional applications of going from idea to manufactured object.

Can you tell the difference between the QuickTime and the animated Gif below?