Abrosoft's FantaMorph is an interesting piece of specialty software that has an application for every segment of the software-using public, from home users to developers. But would I buy it? The answer is a resounding "Yes."
Introduction
First of all, what is morphing? In this application’s sense of the word it’s taking one image and gradually blending it into another. In the most basic use, the application will take two images and create a series of blended frames, gradually “morphing” one to the other. In its more complicated projects, you can morph from one image to another, and another, and another. You could also do a single image morph where you distort the initial image in order to create an effect of facial movement like a wink or smile and so on. You can even morph from one image to another while warping shapes. The possibilities of what you can do in image morphing, and with this application, are literally limited by your imagination alone.
As a professional designer/developer, I hesitate to even bother with specialty pieces of software because they usually just mimic features of larger pieces of professional software and tend to output results that look kind of “canned.” In other words, why use a piece of software that makes Flash photo galleries when you’ve got Flash on your system? If you spent the amount of time you’d have to invest in learning the specialty software on learning how to do the same thing in Flash, you’d probably be able to get a better and undoubtedly more flexible and less “canned” result.
Such is not the case with FantaMorph by Abrosoft. While one could mimic the results in Flash, or another animation program, it would take much longer to get the same or better result than you can attain virtually automatically with FantaMorph. Plus, the output options of this application are loose enough that you don’t get a canned feel and you can further refine the projects in Flash or another program if you want to.
Beyond the exceptional job FantaMorph does and its loose output options, it’s able to do a number of things under the “morphing” umbrella that makes it very useful to a developer/designer. It would be useful for before and after-type morphing, construction and remodeling, automotive body repair, cosmetic surgeon, beauty treatments, website redesign, online advertisements, and more.
Besides its usefulness, the application comes with a number of sample projects. Unfortunately, when you open the application for the first time and chose “existing project,” it opens the projects folder, which would be fine if you’d saved some of your own projects. Instead, go up one folder level, and then into Samples. Here you’ll find some great example projects you should open and examine.
| Performance | Rating  |
What's Hot:
I was surprised that the application wasn’t tougher on my system. While the install sequence checks your system for potential performance issues and you can always check it again from the Help menu, there really are no performance issues. I tried it on my desktop, which is an OK system with an AMD Athlon 64 processor at 2.19 GHz with 3GB of RAM, but just to make sure that my system wasn’t “too good” for a real-world test, I loaded it on my laptop with its very weak Intel Celeron 1.5 GHz and paltry 512 MB of RAM and all was well on that system, too.
| Price to Value | Rating |
What's Hot: Considering the usefulness of the application, I would say it’s a great value. For less than half of what you’d pay for a good plugin, you get a legitimate standalone application that you could use for almost all of your clients. If you used it professionally just one time, you would recoup the cost.
The application comes in three levels: FantaMorph SE (Standard Edition), FantaMorph Pro, and FantaMorph Deluxe, priced at $29.95, $49.95, and $99.95, respectively. There’s a price point and feature set level for any user, whether they’re a home user who wants to make morphs of their newborn, or a developer/designer who wants to make money.
The deeper you dig into any of the versions, the more apparent the price to value excellence becomes.
| Installation & Setup | Rating |
What's Hot: FantaMorph is just a 4.25MB download, so right from the start it’s light and easy. Download ease gives way to one of the nicest installer sequences I have ever seen on a specialty program; first there’s the obligatory license agreement, and next it gives you all the installation options you would expect, as well as letting you select which feature-set level you want to try out and which “skin” you want to use. But then the installer surprises you: it runs you through a sequence where it checks your system for compatibility and capability. Not satisfied with a programmatic check of your system, it shows you samples of what a project image should look like and what your system is capable of generating. The product does this a number of times in an effort to get your user feedback on several key points of performance.
It’s a very interesting installation/setup system, and I honestly don’t ever remember seeing one quite like it.
What's Not: The only thing I didn’t like about it was the “nag screen,” but hey, what do you want for “try it before you buy it software”? The nag screen doesn’t stay up too long, but it does have a cryptic option set for “buy it” and “register.” Maybe they could find easier-to-understand nomenclature for the options, but then again, since this is multilingual software, maybe these words and phrases localize better. I really don’t have a serious problem with any of it.
| User Interface | Rating |
What's Hot: The UI is pretty darn nice. It reminds me of well-done Photoshop plugins like Kai’s Power Tools, Auto FX applications, and the like. It’s skinnable, but that’s simply not something I could ever see myself doing. Working on output is about all I can bring myself to do, so skinning a UI for my own amusement is just not in the cards for me.
Beyond the presentation of the UI, I found it to be very intuitive and task-oriented. I couldn’t imagine someone having a hard time with it, whether they studied the manual or not. I think that’s the benchmark of an application’s UI; if it’s done in such a way that someone can open it up, take a look at a few samples, and dive right in without having to read a book first, they’ve done a good job. That’s the case with this application.
Don’t misunderstand; the UI isn’t easy to use because it’s limited in features, but what they’ve done is put all the common things you would want to do in a scenario as graphic UI elements close to the work area, and then for the higher level tools such as add-ins, they fall back on the menu bar arrangement that’s so familiar in Windows applications.What's Not: It’d be nice to see the add-ins and secondary windows keep the look and feel of the main workspace UI, but that’s just an aesthetic issue.
It’d really be a reach to find something about this UI that’s a problem. I wonder if the fact that the program’s creator has obviously given a lot of thought to its multilingual aspect has the collateral effect of guaranteeing an intuitive user interface.
| Product Features | Rating  |
What's Hot:
The feature set in FantaMorph is so complete that it’s almost beyond description. As I mentioned in the preamble to this article, there’s so much available here that a designer could literally use this application for any client they have.
While I opted to prepare my morph images in another graphics tool first, I did it only because that’s just the way I like to work. But FantaMorph has all the tools for your images such as crop and resize (it works best to morph similarly sized images with their subjects in approximately the same area of the images. There are also tools to make image adjustments and so on.
What I used the professional image tool for was resizing, cropping, and the lasso tool, so I could break the subject from the background and save it as a .PNG with transparency and leverage that feature in FantaMorph.
What's Not:
The only complaints I could possibly think of would come into play with the two lower levels of the application. For instance, the SE version lacks some features that really make the other versions, such as the ability to work with alpha channel and a host of other things. It’s undoubtedly aimed towards the home user market segment. The Pro version contains all the features that are painfully missing from SE, but lacks the add-ins such as Face Extractor, Face Locator, and Face Mixer. The lack of the add-ins doesn’t really limit what you can do with the application, but how quickly you can do it. Since these levels of feature completeness are based on the price of the license, it can’t really be considered a complaint, but a user should thoroughly study the features available at each of the price levels of the product before deciding on which version they want to buy. The company also has reasonably priced upgrades from one version to the next. In my opinion, if you’d pony up the $29.95 for SE, toss in another $20 and get the Pro version. If you find you can’t live without the add-ins, you can always upgrade to Deluxe later.
| Help & Support | Rating |
What's Hot: Here’s where the application lives up to all my “best-case scenario” expectations of any software: the manual is available as a printable PDF, there’s a good solid collection of tutorials on the website, there’s a good number of “getting started” articles, there’s a user forum, and there's all the other stuff one might expect in a much more expensive and much more broadly scoped application.
Yes, their site is a little on the “old school” passé side, but you can’t complain about the content, user friendliness, and capabilities. Besides the tutorials, articles, and forum, there’s a ton of things you can download under the heading of "Free Goodies," such as background images, foreground images, transitions, masks, and lighting effects. These are also nice to use as examples to help you create your own.
To me, support means more than just helping a user when they’ve got a problem or question. It’s about giving a user the tools they need to learn how to get the most they can out of the software. Apparently the makers of this application think about support the same way I do.
While it might not matter to you as an individual, the site is also multilingual (as is the software). While you may only be interested in support in English, it seems to me that their commitment to support all languages is a good sign and indicative of a good attitude towards support.
As I do with all applications I review, I sent a message in to customer support to assess the response time and quality of the answer. I asked a question about a feature that I knew would be an issue in SE, the lack of alpha support (transparency), and got a solid and friendly answer in under a few hours.
Suggested Features
The only possible thing I could think to add would be an .FLV (Flash video) output option and I’d like to see the web page output option set up a page that has an .SWF object in the page that calls an .FLV. That way a long sequence of morphs could load via “streaming” and you’d have virtually no lag time, even for the longest movies with significant sound tracks.
Conclusion
I’m a pretty hard-to-impress customer. I’ve created software myself and have been an MVP with Microsoft and seen some of the coolest stuff they’ve ever done long before anyone outside the company. I’m not necessarily jaded about software, but I think I’m “overexposed.” With FantaMorph I was refreshingly impressed! How impressed? I bought their $99.95 package. I’d buy it again, and I’d wholeheartedly recommend anyone buy it.
It’s the coolest piece of software that I’ve seen or used in a long time. I’m also 100 percent sure that I’ve got a client that I can recoup my investment from on the very first job. He’s got a pressure-washing company and I think a series of before and after images done as a Flash movie would be just killer for his website.