Parallax Studio turns a still image into a looping 2.5D parallax animation for artists seeking motion from still artwork without a 3D pipeline. Auto Depth separates a subject from its background and feathers depth around hard outlines; Body Relief detects people and poses to create depth across body parts. A depth brush provides adjustable size, hardness, strength, and value, with a colour-ramped overlay and undo and redo. Motion controls include focus, path, zoom, loop type, duration, and intensity, with previews at 24, 30, or 60 fps. Animations can be exported as MP4 or GIF at a chosen resolution and frame rate, with optional NVIDIA GPU rendering and NVENC encoding. The app imports PNG, JPG, JPEG, and WebP, and saves .parlx JSON projects that reference source images by path. It is free and open source at 0.00 USD per free, with downloads for Windows, Linux x86_64, and Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 12 or newer. The maker says downloaded models run locally and pictures are not uploaded to a cloud service. The optional 389 MB Depth Anything V2 Base model is licensed CC-BY-NC-4.0; its output should not be used commercially.
Who it is for
Parallax Studio suits artists who want to animate still images, including visual novel scenes and short loops, without a 3D pipeline.
What is good
- Free and open source
- Exports MP4 or GIF
- Includes Auto Depth and Body Relief tools
- Maker says pictures are not uploaded to a cloud service
- Depth painting includes undo and redo
What to know first
- Optional Depth Anything V2 Base model is 389 MB
- That model’s output should not be used commercially
- macOS support requires Apple Silicon and macOS 12 or newer
- No mobile apps
Verdict
Parallax Studio offers depth creation, motion controls, and video or GIF export for still-image animation. Note the commercial-use restriction on output from its optional Depth Anything V2 Base model.
Parallax Studio plans and pricing
All plansCompared on photo animation software
- Free plan
- Yes
- Depth animation
- Yes
- Face animation
- No
- AI motion effects
- Yes
- Mobile apps
- none
- Export formats
- MP4, GIF
