Something Like A Holy Grail

For absolutely ages, I've been experimenting with Stereoscopic Photography - taking two photos and inch or so apart, and fiddling their channels to make Red/Left, Green/Left+Right, Blue/Right and thus create either a sort-of-colour or a greyscale stereograph.

I first tried this in PhotoShop at work, and found it incredibly easy. Similarly, PaintShop Pro does it rather well... But now I'm on a new machine, I don't have either yet. Hopefully the disc for PSP is still lurking around at my parents' place... but I haven't dug it out yet.

So all I have access to by default is PhotoShop Elements - which works with Layers, but not Channels - or the freely downloadable Gimp - which has so far proven unfathomable. One minute the Layers and Channels work as I'd expect, next they're doing something bonkers... or not doing anything. Really must try to get the hang of it while I'm on holiday.

But then, out of sheer desperation, I did a websearch for 'stereoscopic photos', and came up with this link: the Stereo Photo Maker, which even works with Windows 7. What's more, it's incredibly easy to use. Literally just load in 2 photos, and a single click does all the hard work for you. Alignment can be adjusted via a simple 'point and click' system, and several different types of stereo photos can be created. It's very quick and very intuitive... excellent stuff... and the results (Red/Cyan pics below) speak for themselves...





Starscream is just asking for the 3D photo treatment, because he's so... well... three dimensional. Since he's so wide, you only need to turn him a little to create a lot of depth. I may yet shoot more photos, having sorted out the focal length settings on my camera, to keep everything nice and sharp over greater picture depth.