Two ways to present 3D photos on a 2D screen.
I am now the proud owner of 2 3D cameras, one film and one digital. While my digital 3D camera has an amazing 3D screen on the back so I an see the strange 3D photos straight away, my film camera obviously doesn’t have any way to show 3D photos. Once the photos are off the cameras (scanned from the film, or downloaded form the digital), I don’t have a 3D TV or monitor, so what to do?
The traditional way: 3D Anaglyphs
3D anaglyphs use two coloured images along with a pair of special glasses with the corresponding colours over each eye to present a different image to each eye, creating the 3D effect. Because of the need to use coloured lenses, this obviously tints the colours in the photo. When your viewing with these glasses on though, the colours are close enough that you won’t care.
What you’ll need
To create anaglyphs, you will need some image editing software. You will need general purpose editing software, and software for creating analyphs. I found some free software to help out with this, it’s not fantastic, but it does the job. You can get Stereo Photo Maker from here:
http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/stphmkr/
Step 1.
In order to make a 3D image, you need two images taken from slightly different positions. Generally, you will have two images taken with two lenses the distance of your eyes apart. You will need to know which is left, and which is right. This isn’t critical, you know if you get them the wrong way around, and you can just switch them.
With a digital 3D camera, this isn’t a problem. You will already have two images ready to go, and in the case of my 3D digital camera, they are labeled L and R. My 3D film camera actually takes 4 half frame images, with images 1 and 4 being the correct distance apart to make a complete 3D image. When scanning in the negative it can be confusing trying to figure out and emember which is left and which is right. Like I said, you can always switch them later. Here is a scan from my Nishika N8000 3D film camera:
From here I need to grab the first and last image. The more careful I am to avoid cropping or rotating the images, the easier it will be to line them up in the anaglyph software.
Step 2.
Once you have your two images prepped, it’s time to load them up in the anaglyph maker and do some tweaking. In Stereo Photo Maker, click “Opwn Left and Right Image” (2nd open icon from the left).
Select your two images, and hit open.
Now you have your left and right images open, it’s time to combine them and do some tweaking.
First thing we should do is combine them into the red / cyan anaglyph. Click the small arrow next to the anaglyph button, and select red / cyan anaglyph.
This combines the images. If you use your glasses to look at it now, the 3D effect won’t be very good until we do some tweaking. You can do this manually, or automatically.
To let the program try and automatically align your images, click on the Auto alignment button. This is a good idea even if you plan on manually changing things. The Auto alignment tool also corrects other image differences like rotation.
After a while, the image should start to look a lot better. If you are happy with the 3D effect from this process, you’re ready to save the image. If not, you can move on the manually adjusting the alignment using Easy Alignment.
Before we go into Easy Alignment, I just want to explain how alignment affects the final 3D image. Sepcifically, I want to talk about what I call the flat plane.
The flat plane is what I call the part of the final 3D image that lines up with the monitor in your 3D image. Everything in front of the flat plane will be seen as coming out of the picture, and everything behind the flat plane will be seen as going in behind the monitor. The part of the image where the red and cyan images align perfectly will be the flat plane of the image.
In my image, I want the yellow ball to be the flat plane. This means I need the 2 images to align perfectly at the yellow ball. You can see in the above image that it almost aligns. A quick trip into the Easy Adjustment tool and I’ll be able to align them.
There is a lot of options in the Easy Adjustment tool. all we really want to worry about for now is the H. Position and V. Position scroll bars. Use these scroll bars until you see the part of the image you want to be the flat pan line up, then click OK.
From here, all that we need to do is save the image. Go to the File menu, and click Save Stereo Image…
Also of note here, is “Make Animation Gif…”
Animated Gifs
This brings us to the other way to create a 3D effect on a 2D screen, animated gifs. This method uses the animation feature of the gif image format to quickly switch between the 2 (or more) different images to create the 3D effect.
If you only have 2 images, you can use the “Make Animation Gif…” option to save the animation out, and your done. If you have more than 2 images (like my Nishika N800 scan), you can create an animated gif with all of the frames manually using an image editing program such as The Gimp. This will be the topic of my next post.
Enjoy your 3D fun!
