Anaglyphic Photography Made Easy

[ProfHankD] came up with a pretty easy way to take 3D photos using a single lens. He’s making Anaglyph images which use color filtering glasses to produce stereoscopic 3D effects. We’ve seen stereoscopic imaging hacks that use two cameras or a clever combination of mirrors, but this one uses a special filter and post-processing. [ProfHankD] drew up a template that can be used to properly align two colored filters, like those in the lens cap seen above. Once installed, just snap all the pictures you want and then hit them with your favorite photo editing software. This involves separating the color channels of the photograph and offsetting them to increase the depth of focus.

It’s a nice little process, and his writeup is easy to understand even if you’re not a hardcore photography guru.

[Thanks Paul]

13 thoughts on “Anaglyphic Photography Made Easy

  1. 1) Very cool that a prof. would take the time to publish a tutorial and even include real information about the process.
    2) Why use Instructables? It’s awful.
    3)I have seen better lens-cap filters made by amateurs with no power tools at their disposal, why does a professor who has been researching this for a year use a piece of junk filter like that?

    I’m not saying it needs to be aluminum and threaded and professionally made, but hot glue and a lens cap? Really?

  2. @Spork It seems alright to me. Anaglyph 3D is such a poor technique that he’ll probably get bored with it and throw it in a drawer after not too long. (I bought some glasses off amazon to try YouTube’s new 3D feature, and man, I’d forgotten how bad anaglyph 3D is!)

    If I was just playing around to see if something worked, I’d go the hot glue route too, and at my day job I design all of our mechanical parts and program the CNC mills and lathes. I think the lens cap and hot glue method works well enough to play around with it a bit.

    But anyway, you weren’t being mean, so I don’t want to seem mean back. This is clearly a “to each his own” situation.

    I’d actually try this myself, if it weren’t for the aforementioned dislike of anaglyph images.
    -taylor

  3. Cool hack!

    Are there any cameras (or custom firmwares) that allow saving JPEGs in the RGB color space? Anaglyphs turn out much better with these than with standard YCBCR ones. Of course RAW would be best, but JPEGs are more convenient.

  4. Does it work? yes. does it produce good 3d? not a chance.

    Sorry kids, you gotta get the opening separation out to the separation of the human eye. Great for a photography 100 class, useless for anything other than proof of concept.

    3d camcorders = crap. camera shake is tolerable at SD resolutions, at HD resolutions it get’s intolerable, and in 3d it makes you puke. and I have yet to see a home movie person that does not utterly suck at video or holding a camera steady.

    Finally, 3d is a gimmick that is passing fast. The TV’s suck, there is only 1 good camera (Fuji W3) and the only way to view this stuff online is with the crap-tastic 2 color glasses and they still can not fix the problem that the eyes want to focus on other things at other distances.

    The 2 sets of mirror setups are the best bet for the people that cant figure out something as complex as take a photo, move the camera 1 foot, take another photo. $3.00 in aluminum bar stock and 5 minutes on the CNC machine in the basement and I have a camera slider to do that on the tripod.

    Better photo, clearer, and correct or super separation.

  5. @fartface: YouTube’s 3D mode supports side-by-side viewing as well as various interleaved formats for 3D monitors and/or shutter glasses. I use some cheap shutter glasses and a VGA line blanker I built myself to view them and it works very nicely.

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