FantaMorph Review

Ever wanted to see what two people would look like if you morphed them together? Well you can do just that with Abrasoft’s morphing software Fantamorph. Well, sort of. While the program looks fantastic in the model displayed when starting up the program, in actuality, this display works only because of a few limitations of the program. In essence, the blending technique the program uses is an overlay of the two images with a change in opacities. Because of this, in order for two images to blend together correctly and make something that looks remotely like a mix of the two, the two images, termed the source and destination images need to be of the same dimensions and the corresponding images in the images need to be in the same places. If you can get over this fact, though, there are plenty of functions to play around with.

There are three basic functions that the program offers in the Deluxe Edition. The first is the morph, which essentially creates a “movie” similar to taking two images in Adobe Imageready and playing with the opacity. There are plenty of effect options to mask the simplicity of the blending, such as backgrounds, masks, lighting and frames. You can even add captions to each image. These transitions can be controlled however, with rather simplistic control. You can open up a curve of the transition, and choose where each point lies, and how many points (frames) there are.
The next function is the Multiple Morph function, which strings together a list of sequences, stringing together multiple morphs into one giant one. The function in and of itself is not a very complex one, but the interface is easy enough to deal with without a great deal of guess work.

The final function is a warp function, created with dots and lines. How the warp works along these line, is not easy to grasp at first, and requires a look at the tutorial in order to truly understand. These warping techniques can also be applied to the morphing to add another layer of complexity to the intrinsically simple design of the transitions.

Once you’ve created your morphed and warped masterpiece, you can then export it to a movie if you wish, which has multiple different output formats, including GIF images, executable files, web pages, screen savers and even flash movies, and there are optional settings for each of these outputs for the more experienced user to control the quality of the output.

Overall, Fantamorph capitalizes on taking a basic function available from professional image editing software (such as Adobe Photoshop) and simplifying and expanding its capabilities, so that all users regardless of technical or artistic prowess can create what they’re looking for. From the multiple sleek skin looks that come with the program, to the relatively straightforward ways in which you control how images morph into each other, the program is designed to be user friendly, and it generally is. There are, however, some more advanced options in the tutorial which allows for more experienced editors to have more control over the morphs, and create professional looking animations.