10 things you can shoot, edit or create this month, from stately homes to camels and cycle races
1 | CREATIVE
Wendy Evans enters a third dimension and travels back in time to the glory days of 3D
The history of 3D, especially in the cinema, is somewhat tortuous, with almost every new iteration following the same cycle of a boom in popularity, an initial wave of enthusiasm in the industry, general dissatisfaction and eventually, the sound of thousands of 3D glasses being emptied into landfill.
3D attempts to replicate how our eyes see the world, which is basically two image streams, with viewpoints around six inches apart, slightly angled to focus on the subject so each one has a slightly different perspective. Our brains then process the two inputs and create one image with three-dimensional depth.
These days, what’s left of the 3D industry shoots scenes with a brace of converging cameras and displays them for viewing with polarised glasses in the cinema. These work by having the left lens block out the images from the right camera and the right eye lens block out those from the left camera. Your brain does the rest. For a while, the home 3D movie boom was fuelled by active shutter glasses, which essentially do the same thing but require a power source to synchronise how the two image streams are displayed.
However, back in the 1950s, the first 3D boom was based on the anaglyph 3D technique, which works in a similar way. That’s what we’ll show you here, as well as how to create 3D effects from just a single image, using Photoshop. Before
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How to create a 3D illusion
Want to create a 3D effect on a photo you’ve already taken? There’s a quick and easy way to create a 3D effect on an existing image but it works best on images where there are no foreground objects protruding into the top half of the photo. Simply load your photo, go to Channels and click on the Red channel. Press Cmd-A/Ctrl-A to select the channel, then go to Edit > Transform > Skew and drag the top left control point to the left. Do the same with the control point in the top right corner. In the Channels palette, click RGB and use the Crop tool to remove the triangle of red that has appeared. Now you can view your new anaglyph 3D image.
There are two types of anaglyph 3D glasses: red-cyan (blue plus green) and green-magenta (red plus blue). The reaso
