I've been seeing more and more Power Goo morphs come through the archives. I may have a couple of tips for those of you just getting started with it. The biggest give away that Power Goo (or those like it) has been used to do a morph is the deformed background. This is because the tools are not the right shape for the job or are too big to do the small stuff. Nothin' you can do about that, so you have to come up with ways around it.

1) Resample the picture to make at least one dimension (top to bottom or side to side) 360 pixels. This is a magic number for Power Goo, as it will resize your work to 360 X 360 when you import the file, cropping edges, adding white space, or just making the image bigger or smaller........ really annoying.

2) Use a photo editor (Photo Shop, Paint Shop Pro, whatever) to cut out a 360 X 360 section that includes the part to be morphed. *Note - step #1 can be skipped if you can do step 2 without resizing the picture, e.g. fit the breasts (with space around them for morphing) in 360 X 360.

3) Now, using your editor, cut out the section to be morphed. Create a new file from the cutout, making sure the background of the new picture is a solid color (preferably a color as opposite of the cutout colors as possible) and save this as a new bitmap file e.g - Myfile.bmp This is the file you will morph in Power Goo.

4) Open Power Goo, open your bitmap image, and morph away. Be careful, though, not to over use the Grow brush. It tends to cause nasty distortions when over applied. Better results can be achieved with the Move and Smudge tools. When finished, save the file and go back to the Photo Editor.

5) Open the now-morphed picture, select the background color of the morph as the background color of your brush (this is using Paint Shop Pro, I assume other editors have similar functions.) Do a "Select All", then change the transparent color of the selection to the background color ("Selections, Modify, Transparent Color, Background Color") You may want to play with the tolerence level in the transparent color section if the selection still includes too much of the background around the area that you want. Once you get only the morph section that you want selected, hit copy.

6) Open the original image (if it's not already) and paste the copied image into it. Move the pasted image around until you get it where you want it. You will see at this point that the edges of the pasted area don't blend very well. Don't worry about this yet.

7) Now is the time to put things back in front of the morphed area that need to be there. If the breasts have grown so big that they should now be partially behind something, save your work as a new filename and then re-open the original file. Use the original to cut out stuff that should be in front of the breasts (plants, furniture, "other body parts") and paste back into the new file where it belongs.

8) Now add the shadows. Shading is VERY important for realism. Take note of other shadows that already exist and try to match the length, darkness and direction of them. Set your retouch brush to Darken with a very light opacity setting (around 15 to 30.) Make several passes with the darkening brush rather than trying to accomplish a shadow in one stroke. Making your shadows too dark could be worse than no shadows at all.

9) Last but most importantly, lets get rid of those ugly jagged edges. I use the soften brush set to 1 pixel wide and an opacity of about 60. Zoom way in on the edges and blend. Don't over blend, as this can cause the edges to look blurry. When step 9 is complete, you should have a masterpiece you can be proud of.

I don't know if any of you even care to know this, I just felt like sharing.

Have fun,

Mad Max.