Squirlz

I was removing a couple of programs from the PC. Looking through the long list of those I had installed I spotted the name Squirlz. Whatever is that? I thought. It had been on the machine, unused, for so long I had quite forgotten what it did. I ended up having to Google it to see. Aha! - a free morphing program. (Squirlz Morph) I don't remember ever trying it out so decided to have a go.

One way to use it is to load two or more pictures and let the program morph between them. On a quick search I settled on two photos of the Great Spotted Woodpecker. The program can attempt to morph without any further help and did a fair job with these two but it does better if control points are placed on both pictures. They are placed on one and the program puts copies in the same place on the other. Then you move those on the second photo so they are on the same features on both.



The control points are little circles so you may have to enlarge the picture to see them clearly.

Once checked on the rough animated preview there is a choice of saving the morphed animation as an animated GIF, an SWF file or an AVI movie file. I tried them all and the results were much the same. The main difference was file size. The first two made files between 11 and 14MB whereas for the .avi there is a choice of compression codecs. I chose mp4 which made a tidy 505KB movie file. Animated GIF and SWF files play the animation repeatedly whereas the AVI plays through once then stops.



Other choices before or during processing and saving are the number of frames and the frame rate. For this example I ended up using 300 frames and a rate of 20fps.