| Have a digital camera? You can easily make memorable and unique 3D Anaglyphs of people, things, birthdays, weddings, vacation spots, you name it. True 3D! So, what are Anaglyphs anyway? Anaglyphs are made by recombining stereo images, pairs of photographs of the same subject. The critical concept is that the two images represent what each of your eyes would have recorded from the scene. Therefore, in most cases, the two images must be taken about 2.5" from each other. By then presenting the red and cyan filtered images back to your left and right eyes respectively in the form of a color Anaglyph (gray Anaglyph, red and green Anaglyph, interleave for LC shutter glasses and cross-eyed are other uses for stereo images), it is possible for your brain to reconstruct the three dimensional scene from which the images were made. They are not holograms. They will not allow you to move around in an image or see behind items, but it does make you feel like you are there again. Why are you making them? They are just like any other photograph, only more so. You will be able to better capture the image that is before you. Besides, it's just plain fun! 
Above is a screenshot of an output Anaglyph from a typical Anaglyph program.
I like to use Anaglyph Maker. lt's free and very easy to use, with adjustments for brightness, contrast and overlay and it produces Anaglyphs in 6 different formats. A little better one with a few more features is Gunter Richter's great free program Images 3D. Then there's the mother of all Anaglyph programs, AnaBuilder, a very advanced Stereoscopy program with amazing capabilities. It's also free. To view this type of Anaglyph (red/cyan), you'll need a special pair of glasses like these. There's lots of places to get them, A very good quality one's here.They're not free ;-) However, you may obtain a free pair of paper red/cyan anaglyph glasses here. SO, HOW DO I MAKE AN ANAGLYPH? The basic principle is that you need to generate two images of the same subject with a horizontal displacement of about 2.5". This horizontal displacement is called the stereo base. The 2.5" base is good for subjects no further than about 10 feet. You can use a larger stereo base for subjects farther away, and a smaller one for subjects closer. A general rule is 1/30th the distance to the subject.The simplest method is the single camera method. Face your subject, move a little bit to the left and snap a picture. Without rotating, tipping, or tilting the camera, move a little bit to the right and take a second frame. 
That's it. You now have your left and right images and are ready to use the software to make an Anaglyph.This method (single camera) has the restriction that it is most suitable for still life. If anything moves between the time you take the first and the second images, you will have objects in your final images that flicker and distract your eyes. If you want to make stereo pairs of moving subjects, you will need a pair of cameras, syncronized and mounted together.Another way to produce stereo pairs from a single camera uses a slide board. A smooth board with a ledge on the back edge will allow you to slide your camera left to right without rotating, tipping, or tilting it. It makes much better images, but then you have to carry your slide board. You can use any handy horizontal surface as a slide board. Table top, porch railing, rock...it just needs to be flat, level and have a view of your subject. When using either of these two methods, I always work left to right. That is, I take my left image, then shift and take the right. By always doing them the same way, I never have to sit and study the resulting images to figure out which is which.Happy 3D Trails!- Buddy |
| • Stereo 3D Conversion from a single 2D image! |