Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

Create Morphing Animations with FotoMorph

Posted: 27 Dec 2010 03:42 AM PST

Remember the Michael Jackson video from the 1990's for his song Black or White? The end of the video captured our attention because of the two minutes worth of morphing one moving singer into the next.

A sumo wrestler became Tyra Banks as if by magic. FotoMorph allows us to create similar morphs from our own photos, celebrity photos or virtually any other image we can imagine. Want to turn your mother-in-law into a dog? No problem! Want to show your kid grow from a baby to a teenager? Just click a few buttons, and voila!

Start your morphing project by selecting new project and importing the photos you want to morph. Four our example, we are going to morph Captain Picard into a crazed and bald Britney Spears (sorry Jon Luc!).

After importing, we click control, then use a series of dots to line up Captain Picard and Britney's features. The dots are connected on each picture with a series of triangles that represent the movement of how the picture will morph.

So, if we want Picard's eyebrow to fade into Britney's eyebrow, we make a dot on Picard's eyebrow, then go to Briney's picture and align the dot with her eyebrow. We do this for every feature on the face for the best results.

Then, we set the animation properties with the selections on the side. We can set a start delay so we can savor Captain Picard's picture longer…we can also set an end delay so we can stare at Britney.

Finally, we click animation, and export our morph in whatever file type we want. We can export as a Web page, Flash SWF file, a GIF or even an AVI.

Our finished graphic looks like this (saved as a 4MB GIF):

We have one complaint about this program, and it has nothing to do with features. The program displays an Adwords advertisement on the right hand side of the screen.

The maker of the program, Diphso, explains how they have given up on asking people to pay for their software, and instead are using ads for revenue. There is no spyware or anything malicious attached to the program—but it does display an ad the entire time it is open: