3D Pictures, Straight from your Desk

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3D Pictures, Straight from your Desk
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This tutorial can only be followed in Zoner Photo Studio 8 Professional or higher.
If you don’t have one of these versions available, you can instead use the trial version—
—30 days FREE use of the latest Professional Edition.
3D—it’s not just for the movies anymore. Go 3D on your own
computer! Create your very own 3D pictures. It’s as simple as
magic—no wonder we call it a wizard. All you need is an ordinary
digital camera to take the source pictures, Zoner Photo Studio to
make them 3D, and a pair of two-color 3D glasses to show them
to your friends.
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Anaglyphs: A Cool And Simple Road to 3D
Human beings perceive space as a stream of 2D images, one for each eye. The final 3D world we
see is not composed until these 2D images reach the brain. Each eye sees surrounding objects
from a slightly different angle, and our 3D vision comes from joining these two different images.
Thus if you show each eye an appropriately shifted view, the result will be seen as 3D. One way to
do this is to use specially colored pictures and then show them through glasses with one red and
one blue lens. Each eye sees only a part of the picture, and those two parts contained the two shifted views, thus giving the desired 3D effect. 3D images composed this way are called anaglyphs.
Note: Persons with certain vision defects may not see 3D images in 3D.
How to Take Source Photos for a 3D Image
You don’t need a special camera to prepare a 3D image.
In fact with a steady hand, you don’t even have to have
a tripod. All you need are two photos of the same subject
taken from the same distance apart as average human
eyes. For landscapes and faraway objects, you may
want a little more separation, to help the 3D effect
stand out. In practice this means shooting the scene,
stepping aside, and shooting it again at the same
height, but about 2 3/4 inches (7 cm) to the right or left.
It’s important that the scene does not contain motion,
like moving clouds, cars, etc. Try to create a workflow
that you always follow, so you can always remember
which photo is “left” and which one is “right”.
Note: Only these pairs of “one for each eye”
pictures can give you a good quality anaglyph.
No trick exists to squeeze 3D out of an ordinary
pair of pictures.
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Assembling the 3D Image
Once you have your source photos ready, all you need is the 3D wizard in Zoner Photo Studio.
Select the pictures in question, and then use Publish | 3D Image in the Manager.
After you select both source photos, Zoner Photo Studio tries to automatically find “shared points,”
places in the two photos that are the same, so it can assemble the anaglyph. This automatic search
eliminates the manual toil that was once needed for the job. It also guarantees clean results even
if you have slightly shifted or rotated the camera. You can add, remove, or shift shared points by
hand if needed.
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You need to inform the wizard which picture is on the left and which is on the right: if they’re
switched around, the result will not be 3D. In the next step of the wizard, you get a last chance to flip
the left and right picture. You can also hand-correct the pictures’ position and rotation in this step.
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There are four types of 3D pictures you can create in Zoner Photo Studio: black and white, color,
half-color, and optimized. For the black and white type, both pictures are converted into black
and white versions before final conversion to the target colors (red and blue). The remaining types
are in color. They differ in how they treat the image’s red channel. The reason for having different
options here is that large red regions in a picture can degrade the final 3D effect. The color method
retains all colors, half-color uses a weakened red channel, and in optimized you can directly set
the strength of the red channel using a slider.
Tip: While double-checking color and composition, put your 3D glasses on.
It’s interesting that scenes yielding great 2D photos are often inappropriate for 3D, and meanwhile
pictures that look dull in 2D can make for great anaglyphs. For a good 3D photo, you need to find
a scene with simple, striking regions, and some elements at varying distances from the camera.
But don’t worry—you’ll quickly get the hang of taking good source photos and start wowing your
friends. We wish you a lot of fun with this fascinating technology.
For more photo editing tutorials, see Tutorials.
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