App of the Week: iSwap Faces 3.5

Ever since we have been able to digitize or scan our world, there has been a need to manipulate those captured bits and images. Since the beginning, the tools for photo manipulation, for example, have been difficult to use and relatively few people have had the technical skill required to manipulate a photograph with a convincing sense of realism. As computers become more powerful and software becomes more sophisticated, the power of digital manipulation comes closer to the reach of us ordinary people.

The culmination of the synergy between modern processors, modern programming techniques, and the latest innovations in user interface design is an app called iSwap Faces which, at long last, allows you to perform the ever-so-important task of digitally exchanging the faces of two individuals in a photograph.

The iSwap Faces app is really only good for pranks and giggles. It doesn’t do anything beyond letting you swap faces, but you can get fairly convincing results with it and the visual dissonance never gets old. Unlike the industry standard Photoshop that requires a good amount of study and practice to get started, iSwap Faces is very intuitive and most people would have no trouble jumping into it.

When you have a photo opened, you will see two circular shapes that represent the two faces to be swapped. You simply move each circle over the faces in your photo and resize and rotate them as necessary. Clicking on the View icon, you will see the result of the swap immediately so that you can see if you need to make adjustments. To help blend a transplanted face to its new head, there are sliders to adjust contrast and hue so that you can get a perfect skin match.

It does take some practice and fine adjustments to get everything aligned and sized perfectly, but you can get a decent rendition even with rough adjustments. Once you finish you can share your masterpiece directly with the world through Twitter or Facebook. And if your surgery doesn’t result in a masterpiece, you can simply save the final image to the Photo Library for your own amusement.

iSwap Faces is good, clean fun for $1.99.