February 17, 2014

I have made several changes to my technique for creating anaglyphs. Here's a before and after (not the same flower, obviously):

The anaglyph on the right has better coloration and a more realistic 3D effect. The changes mostly have to do with Photoshop technique: changing around my filter usage made a lot of difference with color fidelity, and cleaning up the red and cyan that spills over at the edges gets rid of the weird "ghosting" effect that happens on the right side of the left rose. (I thought for some reason that cleaning up the edges would break the 3D effect...? I was wrong.)

Another thing that made a huge difference is using true stereo pairs. The anaglyph on the left was made using a faked stereo pair (the same image, but one shifted over slightly). The anaglyph on the right uses a true stereo pair, meaning that I took two pictures of this rose from slightly different angles (one photo with my left eye at the viewfinder, one with my right eye at the viewfinder). It only took a little bit of extra time to create true stereo pairs, and the payoff is so great that I plan to use this technique for every other anaglyph I do. 

One problem I have run into is the difficulty of creating an anaglyph with altered photos. I have been applying a series of Photoshop filters to my images to get a paintlike effect, because I have found it usually looks a little nicer than putting straight photographs into my designs. I've found several combinations of filters that look great. The only problem is that most filters flatten the images to the point that 3D effects aren't really possible anymore. See below:

Method A is the same rose I showed you in the beginning - just the photographs, no filters. Methods B and C show what happens when I try to apply filters in two different ways. They're all technically anaglyphs, but only Method A has a good 3D effect.

This means that I will have to find ways to gracefully work photographic elements (anaglyphs) in with more painterly elements and vector elements. I'm having a little trouble doing that in this context so far, but I think it will come to me as I continue to work on it.

See? It's okay, but not as smoothly integrated as it could be. Thoughts?

Update: I just noticed that the red/pink roses are very visually jarring with 3D glasses on. I guess I need to stay away from color extremes, even with elements not directly related to the anaglyphs!