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3D anaglyph photos

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Anaglyphic 3D, an old trick

An anaglyph is composed of two superimposed images of complementary colors, presenting the same scene with a slightly shifted point of view: most often the « left eye » view is in red and the « right eye » view in cyan.

Stéphanie, left eye (red)
Stéphanie, left eye (red)
Stéphanie, right eye (cyan)
Stéphanie, right eye (cyan)

By filtering the light for each eye in an adequate way, a 3D view of the scene can be restored for a spectator possessing an approximately « normal) sight), i.e. possessing two eyes with an innate perception of depth.

The principle was described in 1853 by Wilhelm Rollmann in Germany. Charles Joseph d’Almeida seized on this knowledge, spoke about it at the Paris Academy of Sciences in 1858. Louis Ducos du Hauron perfected the technique, and finished developing it in 1891. It was he who gave the anaglyph name to the method.

Stéphanie, complete view (red + cyan)
Stéphanie, complete view (red + cyan)

The anaglyphic process reaches the cinematograph, adapted by Louis Lumière in 1936. This will however remain slightly used, special glasses being necessary, increasing the cost of projections.

Anaglyphs were widely used at the beginning of the 20th century for tourism (3D monuments), education, leisure, and advertising. Today, improved versions are still used for example in space research, with phase-shifted digital images in anaglyphic mode from the surface of Mars during the Mars Exploration Rover and Phoenix missions.

Old anaglyph from the 1930’s
Old anaglyph from the 1930’s


The depthmap

While doing my research, I realized that a technique is often used by cinema: films are shot normally, then 3D is added afterwards! Technicians use what is called a depthmap for each image.

Original photo of Stéphanie
Original photo of Stéphanie
Depthmap version of Stéphanie
Depthmap version of Stéphanie

The depthmap is a grayscale version of an image. The levels of gray are distributed in such a way as to represent the depth of the original image. The most widely used standard says that light colors are close, and dark colors are far (neutral gray is position 0).

From this depthmap, which therefore indicates a distance from the eye of the observer, we can do simple mathematical calculations to create an image slightly shifted relative to the first. Imagine if this offset reflects the distance between two eyes...

Let’s say that the original image is the one that corresponds to the left eye. By calculating the shifted image that would correspond to the right eye, we simply obtain the basis of anaglyphic 3D.

The process is very time-consuming: each image must first be cut into depth zones, which is a manual operation. Then you need to calculate the shifted image (Photoshop’s Dispersion plugin is perfect for this), and recombine the two sides « left » and « right ».

The cropping of the image is such a painful operation that I tried several techniques:

Know that I spend about four hours per photo to process, cutting and testing, before producing the final image.

’’Clinging’’, original photo
’’Clinging’’, original photo
’’Clinging’’, depthmap
’’Clinging’’, depthmap
Clinging, anaglyph
Clinging, anaglyph


3D photo formats used on this site

In my photo galleries where you can find 3D versions of images, you can encounter the following formats. Here is how to visualize them:


Enjoy my photos in 3D!


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