This lesson deals more with the request side of morphing than the production - though they are good thoughts to keep in mind if you're trying to choose an image to morph yourself as well.

"Can you morph this?" is probably one of the most common posts on the BEA's boards (right below "who is this?" and "are there any more of her?"). But a lot of people post pictures that are, quite frankly, utterly useless for morphing - then often seem surprised no one tries them!

So, here's a lesson in what to look for when selecting an image to morph. Or, more correctly, what to avoid when doing so. These are the "Big Five" problems morphers see when cruising the Morph Requests board and while there are often at least partial work-arounds for them, to be honest, 99% of the time it just isn't worth their time to do a morph that has one (or more! I've seen them with all five) of these problems.

I mean, why spend an hour enlarging the breasts on a picture that - no matter how good you are - will look like crap, when you can spend that hour doing it on a good picture instead?

The Big Five are -

Poor Contrast: Ignoring the girl in pink, let's talk about the two girls in black here. It's hard to morph black (or dark) clothing against a black (or dark) background. No, let me put it another way - it's easy to morph it, but the results are quite often barely visible.

Given the lighting in this picture, were I to morph either (or both) of these girl's, their breasts would end up as pairs of dark areas with a couple of lighter highlights vaguely suggesting big curves.

Work-around: That said, you can always get around this limitation. Morph in a lot of bare flesh as opposed to the clothing now there. Or do what Magic did and basically totally replace all three bodies with ones wearing lighter colored clothing.

Moral: Try to keep to images with at least some contrast between background and breast.

Overly Compressed: Many images formats - most notably jpg's - do what's called "compression" to save space. Basically, by throwing away some of the information you can make what's left a much, much smaller file. And if you're careful, you'll hardly see the difference.

Problem is, keep compressing and you will see the difference, big time - "noise" like on a bad TV shot. Pixilated to the point of mosaic-ness. "Moiré" - which is a fancy term for repeated wavy noise through the whole picture. All sorts of, well, crap turning what could have been a good picture into an unusable mess. The example here is hardly the worst I've seen posted with a "can you morph this" tag-line. Yes, you can morph it, but why? The results are going to look just at least as bad as this picture, just with larger breasts - and they could look much worse, because your morphed breasts might not match the noisyness of the original.

Work-around: If the "badness" is marginal, or you really, really need/want to morph it for some reason, you can do your morph, then you can save just the new sections (usually the breasts) as separate jpgs and deliberately crank up the compression until they look as bad match the original image's quality. Then copy those degraded versions back in and use them to produce the final image.

Moral: If the original is a noisy, moiréy mess, so to will be the morph be. Image quality only gets worse, not better.

Too Small an Image: The number of people who post a picture about the size of a postage stamp and then ask "can you morph this?" is alarming. Quite apart from the fact that the result will still be the size of a postage stamp when you're done, it means you're working on an image where - literally - one pixel in the wrong place can ruin it.

Of course, "too small" is somewhat relative - if it's a close-up, 400 pixels wide can be quite fine to work with. If it's a long shot (lots of scenery, a car, that sort of thing) with the girl only a small portion of the image, even 2000 pixels wide is sometimes not going to be big enough.

Rough rule of thumb: If, when displayed on your screen at 100% size (and assuming at least a 1024x768 screen size), the girl's head is smaller than your thumbnail, you've got problems and should probably look for a bigger image. If it's smaller than your pinkie-nail, you should definitely look for a better image!

And don't even think about asking to "enlarge" the image to make it morphable. No matter what Hollywood has to say on the matter (where expanding a single pixel into an entire clear face takes just three mouse clicks on CSI), that just isn't going to happen.

Let's say that original is, oh, 50x75 pixels in size, Call it a total of 3,750 pixels. You enlarge that image to 300x450 pixels and you now have over 135,000 pixels! Suddenly, each pixel is a block of a single color nearly an eight of an inch wide on you screen. This gives you an image looking more like a mosaic than anything else. And not a good mosaic at that.

Most programs try to extrapolate the differences between adjoining pixels when they enlarge the image to, basically, "guess" at what color should be between them. This smooths out the "blocky" look - but also blurs the image a whole heck of a lot.

Free programs - or high-end Photoshop, Corel, etc. - they are all going to have this problem, because you are trying to multiply the amount of information in that picture over thirty-six times. For every original pixel, the program is creating more than thirty-five others - and basically just guessing what those other thirty-five should look like.

And 300x450 is still on the small size for a morphable image!

Work-around: Enlarge it as big as you usefully can, do your morphing and finally shrink it back down to the original size. This will make it easier to work with and the shrinking will blend the morphed bits in better with the original image when done...

...still be the size of a postage-stamp though...

Moral: This is a hobby/fetish that deals with big, bigger, biggest - we should at least use big images then.

Not Enough Room to Grow: Take a look at this girl (which is hardly the worst example of this problem). Let's assume I expand those B-Cups into a more reasonable G or H cup (okay, I have a warped sense of "reasonable...") - where are they going to go? Most of their bulk is now going to be outside the frame of the image. That kinda makes enlarging them a bit of a waste as you're not going to see them.

Work-around: A couple, really. You can do a fancy "artistic" image where her breast basically "burst forth" from the frame. That doesn't work at a lot of angles, though, and is kinda hokey to my mind. Or you can try to create more - and matching - background for those breasts to be against (which can be a pain in the butt/impossible if the background is anything other than simple colors/shapes). Or you can "cut out" the whole image - original, morphed breasts and all - and paste it against a new background with room for some proper breasts (which brings up a whole world of hurt matching lighting and colors and whatnot between background an girl - not to mention the problems of neatly "cutting out" the image in the first place!).

Moral: If you want her to have breasts the size of basketballs, it's probably best that there be room for breasts the size of basketballs in the original image.

Blurred Image: This is actually the same sort of problem as the "overly compressed" image problem - you're putting a lot of work into creating new breasts onto an image that's too poor to appreciate. Admittedly, it makes it easy to morph - defects are a snap to hide in the blur. But what's really the point when those M-cups are just amorphous blobs sorta floating in front of another vaguely human-shaped amorphous blob?

Work-around: The "sharpen" command in a lot of programs can often partially fix a blurry image. But the more you sharpen, the more pixilated it gets (it's actually similar to the "enlarge a too small image" problem), so there are definite limits!

Moral: Focus the damn camera!

Other Problems: Apart from the above, there are numberless less serious potential problems with an image. There can be something (an arm, a table, a 747...) in the way of the breasts getting bigger - or just in the way of seeing the breasts. Strange fabric patterns (mesh is the worst) can make it terribly hard to enlarge without looking distorted, blurred, or both. The model's position can just be weird. The list goes on an on.

These problems, though, are all minor compared to the "Big Five" above - and sometimes can actually be fun just for the challenge! It all depends on how the person who morphs your image feels that day.

So keep an eye out for the "Big Five" and your images are much more likely to be morphed.

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