Around 1992 to 1993, there was a Mac application title something like, I think, Morph. When you start off, you have two windows. In one window, you add numerous points on a picture. Then you move those points with a different picture in the other window. I personally grabbed a copy. It was something totally new. Afterwards, there were several similar freeware and shareware titles.

So what does Morpheus Photo Warper do for us? Unlike its sister application Morpher, Morpheus Photo Warper doesn’t exactly do the conventional morphing job. Rather, it will let you animate a distorted image. And you can export the animation in Animated GIF, QuickTime, Flash (SWF), Uncompressed AVI and so forth.

So how does it work? When you first start off, choose New Layout under File. Okay. Then? Drag and drop a photo image (GIF, JPG, PNG, TIFF…). If you have used morphing software, you probably know what to do next, right? Add points? Well… You actually want to define your plane at first. Go to Options under Timeline. (See Screenshot 02) I have a photo image at the size of 800 times 600 pixels. So I want to enter those numbers under Size. Under Playback, I want to set the frame rate to 24. So I will have 24 frames per second. I’m not done setting up my Layout. I also need to go to Options under Morph. Under this window, I need to define the length of my animation. So if I enter 96 for Frames in this morph, the length of my animation will be 4 seconds since I set the frame rate to 24 earlier. (See Screenshot 03)

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Okay. Then it’s time for me to add points. I need to use Pan and Zoom to get the right spot under Starting Picture. I want to distort her beautiful lips. (See Screenshot 05) Use the Add Points tool to add points. Use the Move Dots tool to adjust locations if necessary. In my example, I connected dots with lines though I didn’t have to.

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If you finish working on the Starting Picture window, see the Ending Picture window. You get the same number of points at the same locations. So you need to move these points to distort the image. Simply use the Move Dots tool to relocate the dots. If you are finished, play your animation on the Preview window.

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Okay. If you are totally finished with your project, choose Render Timeline under File. (See Screenshot 10) And if you are going to export it to QuickTime, you must have configured QuickTime settings under Timeline Options > File > File format > Codec by this time because the rendering process will instantly start.

All right, let’s take a good look at Timeline Options. You configure the compression rate (Quality) and the frame rate. If you click on Codec, you will get to define the compression, the frame rate and the resolution again. (See Screenshot 11) What will happen if you define the resolution differently? So that’s kind of confusing. Another confusing part is the Transparency option. What is Transparent threshold? Well, I read its official tutorial, which has no explanation for this feature. I also went to developer’s forums. I got two results by searching for threshold, but they were irrelevant to Transparent threshold.

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So we contacted the software developer some 30 hours ago and asked about the overlapping settings and transparency threshold. And the following is their reply.

“When rendering, the choice of file you are creating determines which options have any meaning. The threshold option only really matters when rendering to an animated GIF file, because it does not support all of the translucency as rendered. If you render to a series of still PNGs or a SWF file, they support full translucency, so you would be best off setting the threshold to 0. Otherwise, if it is at 128, then all rendered pixels with an alpha value of 0 to 127 will be modified to be rendered as entirely transparent with an alpha value of 0. This happens for each frame of the rendering, and does not modify the source image you are warping.”

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Anyway, if you need some help, you can go to Tutorial under Help. (See Screenshot 13) And you will get 6 pages of tutorial. Oh, great! In fact, I wanted to find out what lines are for because I had no idea at first. There are four tools: Move Lines, Select Lines, Connect Dots and Draw Free Lines. Without knowing what lines do, these tools will be useless. But the tutorial merely explains how to add points to create animation. Well, you can figure that out for yourself in a matter of 10 minutes, can’t you? The last page actually talks about export options. But it doesn’t mention transparency or threshold at all.

By the way, there are shortcut keys for such functions as panning, zooming and adding points. (See Screenshot 12) These shortcut keys may become inaccessible after a while. I tried to use P and Z. But I could use them only under the Preview window. After closing the document and opening it again, I got those shortcut keys back, though.

Furthermore, there is one feature that I wish that this application supported. Photo Warper only lets you import one image. It would be nice if it supported multiple layers. For example, you may want to distort just an arm of a figure to create a scene like Mr. Fantastic from Fantastic Four extends his arm in the movie. In order to do so, you will have to distort an image of just an arm and export it in alpha. Then you will need to combine the exported video with the original picture using iMovie, Final Cut Pro or whatever.

We like this relatively affordable application. It’s fun to play with it. Nonetheless, software tutorial or developer’s website offers little help in understanding how their software works. The developer is not necessarily responsible for explaining how to set up QuickTime options because that would be Apple’s job. But they are responsible for explaining how their unique features work. And the software developer has completely failed in this regard. The 6-page tutorial doesn’t even tell you to go to Timeline > Options or Morph > Options to define your layout. It merely tells you to add a photo and add points.

MacHouse recommendation: Despite its poor help menu, we give a Buy-It! recommendation to this Mac software title for those who work with movies and photos. It’s relatively affordable. There are some commercial plug-ins for Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects for image distortion. But they are all way more expensive.






Morpheus Photo Warper Mac is a product of Morpheus Software, LLC.
The photo appearing in the screenshots comes from Webshosts

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