From: L-Bueno@cup.portal.com (Louis Alberto Bueno)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: BEST-SELLING SOFTWARE ALLOWS TRANSFORMATION OF IMAGES
Date: Sat, 23 Jan 93 10:36:41 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world

The following is a newspaper article on the Macintosh's morphing software,
"Morph."  I Just want to say that I find it incredible that ImageMaster
featured morphing first on the Amiga platform (to be later joined by
CineMorph and Morph Plus), and nary a remark is made in the popular media. 
Yet as soon as it hits the Mac, it's "revolutionary" and "innovative"
software.  I must admit, it just helps to strengthen my belief that our
platform (the Amiga, for the advocacy-impaired) is a minority one, and
if it were a race, one of its number would be called Uncle Tom :-(

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	Copied without permission from:     
	The Washington Post, January 19, 1993

	BEST-SELLING SOFTWARE ALLOWS TRANSFORMATION OF IMAGES

	By Mark Potts

	SAN FRANCISCO - You've seen it in movies, commercials and music
videos: that strange special effect in which a face is smoothly transformed
into someone else's face, a speeding car becomes a leaping tiger or a
dancing couple's clothing shifts magically through two decades of fashion.

	It's called "morphing" (an altered contraction of the word
"metamorphosis"), and it's just about the hottest special effect in
Hollywood these days. Made possible by powerful computer hardware and
software, each commercial "morph" can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

	But not anymore. A small San Diego-based software company, Gryphon
Software Corp., is riding the personal computer software best-seller lists
with a simple Macintosh version of morph technology that can be had for
less than $100. The transitions aren't quite as smooth as the Hollywood
version, and the images are a bit grainier, but the software package,
appropriately called Morph, demonstrates how increasingly powerful personal
computers and software can emulate graphics effects that only a couple of
years ago required supercomputers.

	While some graphics artists are using Morph to liven up business
presentations, it is mostly being sold as a sort of computerized novelty.
"There is no market for this," admitted its creator, Duane Maxwell, Gryphon
founder and chief technical officer. "It's just fun."

	"People buy it to play with it, and at 99 bucks, it's a great
little tool," said Tim Bajarin, a computer industry analyst at Creative
Strategies in Santa Clara, Calif. "It is a neat product."

	Morph, which was released last fall, was a big hit at the MacWorld
Exposition here earlier this month, with dozens of people crowding around
Gryphon's modest booth to watch a video demonstration of the effects
created by the program. As the computer displayed several pictures of
Marilyn Monroe morphing smoothly from one to the other, or a little girl
transforming into a poodle-and back-the crowd oohed and aahed and
speculated about how much computer power the program required.

	Not much, as it turns out. Although the program's packaging says
Morph requires a fairly powerful Macintosh to run, it can be used, in
slightly limited form, on the least expensive color Macintosh, with the
standard amount of memory. (A Windows version is in the works.)

	To run Morph, a user begins by picking two photos to morph between.
They are scanned into the computer or taken from existing images on a disk.

	The program doesn't simply fade one picture into the other; it
actually transforms each individual feature from one image into its
counterpart on the other, as selected by the user. To do this, the user
must spend a few minutes setting "key points" on the images to ensure that
various features correspond with each other: an eye for an eye, a tooth for
a tooth.

	The computer does the rest. In a few seconds, it can create a still
picture combining the two original images, or it can create a short movie
that can show one image becoming the other over a few seconds in a
lower-quality version of the morphs from TV and the movies.

	Morph has a couple of drawbacks - creation of three-second movies
can take as much as a half-hour on lower-powered machines, the results are
choppy, and the movies and images created with the program tend to occupy
large amounts of space on computer hard disks. And unlike its Hollywood
counterpart, Morph can be used only with still pictures - although a
version that can transform moving video images should be available later
this year.

	Nonetheless, Morph has drawn generally rave reviews from computer
magazines, and it has turned Gryphon into a successful software company
virtually overnight. The company has sold tens of thousands of copies in
the past few months, according to Maxwell, a Silicon Valley veteran who
founded the privately held Gryphon with some friends to work on
three-dimensional computer rendering programs. (Morph, which he describes
as "a weekend hack," is a spinoff of the 3D technology.) That sales volume
makes it a big hit in the specialized computer software world, where sales
of a few thousand copies are average. The company does not discuss its
financial position.

	But the 10-person company is basking in Morph's sudden success.