3D Conversion of Images With Photoshop

[Lin Evans]

Back in the early days around 2006 when version 5 of PTE was first released, there was lots of interest in making PTE shows using 3d Images. Lately I've had a couple emails from people who are interested in doing this and asking whether I knew how to convert regular photos to three dimensional photos. In 2006 I was interested in Lenticular printing, which is today used for holographic prints on things like driver's licenses, etc., and I had purchased a software called Pro Magic Lenticular Designer which among other things will allow the user to convert their regular images to anaglyph 3d. I made a couple little samples and other than a couple posts from a gentleman in Denmark, there wasn't  a great deal of interest and the topic pretty much died. Now that it's possible to easily see our slideshows on television, there is again an interest being generated in creating 3d shows. There is at least one software company which produces a product to convert your videos to 3d so it's coming!

With this in mind, I thought for people who have Photoshop, I would show you just how easy it is to convert any of your color or black and white images to anaglyph 3d. The anaglyph red and cyan glasses are available on Amazon and are incredibly inexpensive. Some can be purchased for under two dollars a pair including shipping!  So below is a little video tutorial on how to do this. It just takes a few seconds and produces a very nice 3D effect for your color or monochrome images. 

I'm well aware that there are more complex things one can do with Photoshop, for example it's possible to make selections then change the amount of separation of red and cyan to a greater degree with features of the image which one might want to appear closer and diminish the separation in the background. That's for another tutorial at another time. The method I present will give a very nice 3D image for the vast majority of your photos and is a fun and quick way to enable using 3D in your PicturesToExe shows. With the enhanced masking techniques now available, it might be fun to experiment with parallax animations again as well - something to think about in conjunction with 3D images.

Lin

When you have finished converting your image to 3D as per above, just "save as" and save the image to a jpg and don't forget to add 3D to the name so you don't overwrite your original image.

 

[Lin Evans]

Hi Tom,

Yes, there are numerous ways to do this - some more complex and actually better. The way I suggested is very rudimentary and the results are only fair. 

Using two camera or a stereo camera is by far the best way. Years ago I had a jig I made where two small digital cameras could be mounted with the lens center distance being the average pupillary distance between. Sadly the cameras I used could not have their shutters synchronized so to make it work I had to have two mechanical shutter releases and press them simultaneously. I quickly tired of that and bought some expensive software which would take a single capture and turn it into a stereo image. It really worked well, but nobody was really interested it doing it so I finally gave up with it. Something sparked my interest again but I've not been able to find the software and the manufacturer is no longer in business so it was a dead end. I suspect I lost the software when one of my hard drives went south. Having around six external hard drives each on three different systems, I can't even remember which one it might have been.

We had one PTE user who made some beautiful PTE shows in anaglyph stereo 3D but he drifted away and hasn't been on the forum in years. He had an ideal setup with a stereo camera and his shows were outstanding. Perhaps when Version 10 is released it might be possible to do this again except instead of anaglyph perhaps with a newer method as is being used in IMAX photography. It would be really nice to be able to shoot video that way. There are so many great things which "can" be done but never enough time or money to pursue them...

Best regards,

Lin

[Lin Evans]

Definitely capturing a moving subject - video and macro photography was the primary object of doing this for me. Just a tiny amount of wind movement can totally destroy a stereo object in 3d if the shutters are not synchronized.

Best regards,

Lin