MorphX: Create Animated Image Transitions With Ease

With MorphX you can create great image transitions and save them as QuickTime movies. All you have to do is drag lines indicating the similar areas of the pictures and MorphX does the rest. When you’re done, tie the videos together and you have your unique and totally customized slideshow. Let’s see this small and handy software in detail.

The GUI is very simple and you don’t have a lot of options to play with, in fact all you can do is customize the toolbar on the top. The color of the lines can also be customized.

Drop one or two images to the panes and start indicating the similar areas of the pictures by dragging lines. You can add points by clicking on the picture and remove them with backspace. Dragging these lines to different areas of the pictures will result in funny and odd transitions. Personally I find it rather hard to control the transition of the pictures. If I change the position or the angle of the lines I don’t know what is going to happen. You can zoom in to see your picture in detail but that’s not really necessary since you need to see how the transition will look like.

The preview window is very small to see your transition in detail so the best way to test is rendering the movie. The render screen brings up all the options you need: size of the video, frame per seconds (speed) and length (total frames), rendering quality and the codec for encoding. You can reverse the video and get a preview of all the changes you make instantly before saving it. The panes also distort the pictures which is a little disturbing sometimes, this is why a good preview function would come handy.

As you can see it’s quite easy to create great visual effects with this tool for video. Another function of MorphX is that you can save snapshots of your pictures morphed at any frame. However the quality of the snapshots is not good enough for professional use. I also miss the possibility to add more then two images. I don’t see a reason why not have this feature since it would be fun to morph 3-4-5 or even more pictures together. Video morphing would also be a great addition to MorphX. I see a lot of power here that is no’t exploited yet. I can’t figure out a way to increase the quality of the picture or the video. After rendering the video looks very low in resolution although I used high quality images and the highest settings.

Overall MorphX from Norrkross is a great free tool for making good-looking image transitions in minutes. I miss some features which would probably be easy to include and which would put this nifty software to a professional level. The fact that you are limited to morph two images at a time makes MorphX very limited. Picture and video quality is only good enough for SD YouTube movies. Despite the missing stuff MorphX is something every Mac user should have or at least once try.

Tags: Mac, Morphing, morphX, Software