How To Make Anaglyphs in 10 Easy Steps

Written by Rolf

Long ago, I fooled around with a cheap webcam to try and make anaglyphs myself. I kind of succeeded but last night I had some insights and tried again. With good results. So, time for a new tutorial. We will make an anaglyph in color!

As in my first tutorial, I still do it with only 1 camera. So pick a subject you want to photograph in 3D and get started. Choose something non-moving. Anaglyphing your ADHD chihuahua with this tutorial is not a good idea.

Needless to say, you will need 3D glasses of the red/blue kind to see this.

Do It Yourself

1. Take one picture. Don't use flash. This will represent the left eye ('L').

2. Rotate the camera horizontally around your focus point, about 3 inches or 8 cm to the right. Effectively this will be the same as just moving it sideways if you are not focusing anything nearby.

3. Take another picture. Don't use flash. This will be your right eye ('R').

4. Open the 2 images in Photoshop and optionally adjust them with Auto Levels or Auto Contrast.

5. Pick color rgb(255,0,0) (red). Grab a big paintbrush with 100% opacity, set it to Multiply and paint over L.

6. Change the color to rgb(0,255,255) (cyan) and paint over R.

7. Select, copy and paste L onto R and set that newly created layer to Screen (or Difference or Exclusion, doesn't matter).

8. Align the two layers vertically if you failed step 2. Align the layers horizontally where you want the screen to be aligned with the photograph. If you want the foreground to jump out, align the layers to what's behind it. In this example, I aligned the wall to overlap in L and R, so that the puppet in front of the wall seems to jump out from the screen.

9. Crop the image where needed and save it.

10. Happy-dance. You are done.

We are done! (click for a bigger version)

Good luck and enjoy anaglyphing your life!