Beautiful Morph

Supplies:
Paintshop Pro (I use V9)
Animation Shop
Filters Sqirlz Morph
A tube and 2 to 4 images (jpg or bmp) of choice, mine are by Olivia and used with a CILM license
A Scrapkit of choice, it should contain a paper, a frame and some embellishments. Mine is the Summer Sunset Freebie by Baby Cakes Scraps, just don't forget to come back after downloading loads of goodies lol
A mask or two wouldn't go amiss either.
Font(s) of choice

Okay, let's get organised. Open your tube in psp, make a copy and close the original, open the images in Sqirlz Morph, choose images that are similar in their subject matter. The 4 I chose were all almost frontal facial closeups, and they had at least one feature in almost the same place, which were the eyebrows. They also need to be the same dimensions. You need to make a copy of one of the images and give it a different name. Finally back in psp open the scrapkit in your browser only. Open AS ready to use.

First we'll make the morph, click on view in Sqirlz Morph, resize the pictures and spread them out so you can see them all, they can overlap a bit.
Make the first and last picture the same image, the program sorts the animation according to file name, so you might need to move the order under image/Animation Order, click on a filename and use the arrows to move it up and down.
Please note, my two tags jump back to the first frame, because I didn't have the 1st pic again as the last. I made the animation better with the 3rd tag I made and then remade because it was for someone else... Trial and error huh, but I have added here what I learnt, so you don't get jumpy tags lol.. Click on the green + and then proceed to click on prominent features in your first picture. I chose the top of the brows, the pupils, the height of the cheekbones, the tip of the nose, and the corners plus top and bottom of the mouth.
If you made a mistake you can remove the circle with the red - button. Your other picture(s) will now have circles on them also, you will need to move them. Make the black arrow in the left menu and also the second image, left click a circle to make it unsticky, move the cursor until you are over the same feature at the same point as in the first picture. Left click again and the circle will stick. Proceed like this until all of your images have dots in the right places. Please see below for reference.
Now click the yellow arrow in the top menu to view the animation in the lil preview window.
Save the animation as a gif, don't worry about the speed and size of it, you'll fix that in AS.

Open the animation is AS and delete the first image, it will be in a frame from your scrap later on, so measure the dimensions of the frame inner in PSP.
You can do this by going along the width and length individually with the lasso tool. You need to have your status bar actve for that. View/toolbars/status. It's at the bottom of the screen. Resize and crop your animation so it will fit in the frame. My animation is a square, 360x 360, my frame is oblong, but 360 wide, so I will need to crop to about 250 height.
Edit, select all.Take the crop tool, click on options and type in the dimensions you need where there is already numbers, click okay, a frame will appear on the image, you can move it with your cursor. Move it until you have a section you want to keep and click on crop.
Make the arrow active again and click into the first frame of your animation, right click and copy. Paste as a new image in PSP.

In PSP, make a scrappy tag, there are tons of tuts out there if you need one, but maybe use your imagination here.
Leave all the layers stacked for now, do not merge anything with the frame especially, use the one image from the animation as a reference of where the animation will be in the finished tag. Don't resize either until I say. This is where I am now, no name and no credits yet.
Now I'll resize by percentage and then crop off the excess white. If you do it the other way round your animation won't fit in your frame anymore. Resize, bicubic, all layers checked, to 80%, I started with a 500x500 canvas btw.
Go to AS, edit/ select all on your animation and resize it by the same percentage. Back in PSP you might want to sharpen some elements on your tag.
Add the credits now in a colour that compliments your tag.

Now we will do some merging. In your layer palette x out all the layers above the frame, including the frame, and merge the others visible, yes, that includes the reference frame.
X out the merged layer and unhide all the layers above the frame, including the frame. Merge visible. You now have two layers. Add your name as a vector layer, convert to raster layer and give it a dropshadow. And save as a pspfile so you can use it again.
Now x out the name and the layer with the frame, make the bottom layer active, right click, copy.
Go to AS, right click on emptiness and paste as new animation. Duplicate that frame until you have the same amount of frames as your animation, mine has 20. Edit/ select all. On your animation, click the first frame, edit/ select all.

Right click the first frame and copy. Right click into the bottom layer and paste into selected frame. Do not left click until your frame is exactly on top of the reference pic.
Back in PSP, x out the bottom layer and make the other two visible. Right click and copy merged, in AS paste as new animation, make 19 frames, and paste onto your tag the same way as described before.
You should not have to move this, it should drop in the right place, left click to stick it on. Click on the lil movie strip to watch your tag move, mine was too fast, so I adjusted the frame properties to 15 to make it slower. When you close your original animation, save it as an .mng file and save it along with the pspfile of the tag for future tagging.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial, you can send me your results to the email below, I'm a nosey cow, haha.
My second example features the photography of Akif Hakan Celebi and another kit by Babes Cakes, it's called Midnight Sparkles and is also on her blog, in June 08.

This is the tag with the 1st frame doubled

This tutorial was created June 12, 2008 and is the sole property of ooh...babelicious. Similarity to other tutorials is purely coincidental. Do not copy this or any of my tutorials, or any part of my tutorials, to another site unless you have express permission from me to do so. If you want to share, send the URL, do not direct link or offer on your site. Give credit where credit is due. Do not script this tutorial and offer to others.