Morph Age is Creaceed's professional warping and morphing application. Morph Age Pro 4 is to morphing what Shake is to compositing, and that's not an exaggeration. Morph Age Pro is even used by scientists to study facial differences between closely related people.
Morph Age 4 (approx. 167.00 Euros) can warp an image or it can morph one image into another. The Pro version can do this with movies as well. That’s basically what Morph Age Pro 4 does, but behind these simple features hide some nifty functionality that you can’t call basic or just for fun. Morph Age and Morph Age Pro mean business, serious business if you are involved in creating movies from warping images, or morphing two images into each other—think advertising, science, video clips, and more.
As I said in the summary, Morph Age is used by scientists to see how closely related people also have the same physiognomic characteristics. Scientists don’t use toys, and I can assure you Morph Age isn’t a toy. The interface may look simple, but that’s clever deception. In fact, I found Morph Age Pro 4 to be simple to use, but not simple in its potential effects.
The first thing you can do with Morph Age Pro 4 is warp an image. You’ll drag an image to the main window, create some curves on the area of the image you want to warp in the first pane, and select and drag the curve handles in the second pane until your image area has warped the way you wanted. With faces, this means you can give someone a broader nose, or glaring eyes.
I was a complete novice when I first started reviewing Morph Age Pro 4 and it took me a quarter of an hour to create a decent warp the first time I tried it. It was easy to grasp the steps you have to take to create a nice effect and subsequent warping “projects” took no more than some five minutes to cook up something decent. You may spend more time if you go for perfection.
Morph Age Pro is Shake for warping and morphing
The resulting image can be saved as a new image or as a QuickTime movie.
Morphing is a step further. It takes two images that have to be dragged into the first and second pane. You start with creating curves in the first one, then adjusting the curves until they fit in the second pane. Hit the Preview button and you’ll immediately see the morphing result. Again, you can save as a new image or a movie.
The Pro version of Morph Age allows you to warp or morph video clips. It made me think of Shake, where you can do the same, but with a lot more effort. Of course, Shake is more powerful and can do many things that Morph Age Pro can’t, but I wouldn’t morph or warp in Shake when something as easy to use as Morph Age Pro only adds some 167 Euros to my investment in compositing tools.
The working method with movies doesn’t change, that’s what makes Morph Age Pro so interesting; you can exercise using images and then tackle movies when you’re ready. So far, so good. Simple interface, easy to use. But that’s not all Morph Age Pro 4 has to offer.
And the obligate iLife and iSight import capabilities are not what makes Morph Age Pro 4 so powerful and versatile. What makes this application really powerful are its expert tools. Once you get the hang of creating simple warps and morphs of images and video clips, you can start thinking about more variation in your work. For example, you can easily change the speed at which the blend of the images or video clips happens, and the speed of the motion of the changes you have applied to the curves on the images.
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Smart Assist intelligently helps with morphing an image
You can change all that using a curve that you can manipulate while seeing the results in real-time. The duration of a transition can be changed, as well as the transition itself, effectively lengthening or shortening the whole process.
More then two images can be morphed, using things called targets and channels and you can manipulate the whole process on the timeline using keyframes. In version 4, you can restrict an action to a region of interest, which offers additional creative potential, or just the capability to see differences and similarities in a very specific image zone.
Smart Assist, a new feature to Morph Age 4.0, helps you locate curves of one image or movie onto another. With Smart Assist turned on (it’s off by default), you can select one curve and all the others will move in the same way automatically. When one curve has been positioned using Smart Assist, you can select another curve and move that with all other curves moving along—except the one you had already selected and moved before.
Smart Assist is almost like there’s intelligence in Morph Age 4.0.
Layers allow you to deform parts of an image without touching parts that are visually beneath the one you’re moving. Suppose you want to make someone’s chin hang over his shirt, all it takes is a layer. A nose correction which you don’t want to influence the victim’s lips, can be set up with a barrier curve, keeping the lips tight.
Transparent images can keep their transparency even after warping or morphing. And if you want to really go wild, you can also colorise a curve, so that the morphing action becomes a colourful event. Even there, if you want to keep the colour effect within the boundaries of a specific area, it is enough to create a barrier curve and the colour won’t bleed through across the entire image—or video clip.
Exporting can of course be done to a large number of image formats and video formats—everything QuickTime supports is possible.
