Tutorials2D GraphicsPhotographyPhotography – How to create 3D photos

Photography – How to create 3D photos

Written by Marc Roberge | 22 March 2010

How to create awesome 3D anaglyphs with your digital camera and freeware Anamaker 3D.

Creating 3D anaglyphs with your digital camera is easy but may require some experimentation. You don’t need any expensive equipment either. What you will need are a digital camera, some Red-Blue or Red-Cyan 3D glasses and a small freeware application called Anamaker 3D.

To create realistic depth, you will need to take 2 photos of each scene or object you want to convert to 3D. There are several considerations when taking your pictures. The first consideration is distance: from your primary subject and perspective shift of the camera. For subjects within 20 feet (~6 meters) from your camera, you will want to take your first picture and then shift your camera to the right by 2-3 inches (5-8centimeters). This emulates the distance between your eyes and each eye would see from that distance. An important thing to remember is to keep your camera forward facing: do not rotate your position to keep the subject centered.

Consider the following photos. In both cases, the camera remained forward facing whereby the subject, the bridge, is centered in the first frame and shifted left in the second frame.

If your subject is further than 20 feet (~6 meters), you may want to increase the camera shift correspondingly from 2-3 inches (5-7 centimeters) up to 12-14 inches (30-35 centimeters) to compensate. When shifting your body or camera position, it is also important to keep your camera level and keep your scene’s vertical alignment in the frame fairly consistent.

When you are first starting out, I recommend you take several shots of every scene with varying amounts of camera shift. Other things that can improve the perception of depth are to ensure there is a considerable distance between your subject and the background in your scene. For example, if I were taking photos of a person in front of a wall, I would generally position myself about 10 feet from my subject and would position the subject 5-20 feet from the wall. This distance can be greater of course. I also find the effect works better if there are other elements in the scene at different distances between your camera and the background of the scene.

In this scene, there are trees, posts and rocks at varying distances from the camera which add to the overall feeling of depth.

Once you have your pictures, you can transfer them to your computer. You will want to download Anamaker 3D. Another great free 3D anaglyph maker is Callipygian 3D. Anamaker requires no installation – simply download and extract from the .zip.

To launch the application, double click the 3D Anamaker icon:

Anaglyph options include Anaglyph gray (Red-Cyan), Anaglyph color (Red-Cyan), Anaglyph Red-Green and Anaglyph Red-Blue. When creating anaglyphs, one image will be rendered or overlaid with red and the other with blue, green or cyan (blue and green mix). As viewing these images requires using anaglyph glasses that work by using colored filters to block opposite color channels, the resulting anaglyph image may lose some of it’s original colors. The best results are obtained using red-cyan.

From the options, select “Anaglyph Color (Red-Cyan)”. Next, click the “Load Left Image” button.

This can be a little confusing at first, but essentially when loading the “Left” image, you want to load the picture where the subject is off to the right of the frame.

If I were using the following pictures, “Photo 15” would be my “Left” image and “Photo 14” would be my “Right” image as the subject in “Photo 15” is further right in the frame.

Load your left and right images and click the “Make 3D Image” button.

You will get something like this:

Now we need to adjust the image. Put on your 3D glasses and, use the positioning buttons from the left hand menu to adjust the cyan layer. U=Up. 5U=5 pixels up. R=right, L=left and D=down, and so on and so forth.