Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Anaglyphs

This is topic Anaglyphs in forum Film-Yak at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Jerry Chase (Member # 660) on 03-09-2002, 04:12 PM:

I don't know if anyone here is interested in old stereoview images, but I've always been fascinated with them as the "Cutting Edge" technology of the 1860s, and a very real window on the past. I have a small collection of these, but I used to find it a PITA to get out the viewer and squint at the small images.

After doing some photo restoration on some scanned family photos, I decided to go after these images to see what I could do. I fixed the worst problems with fading and tears, converted them to anaglyphs (red/blue images), enlarged the files and put them on my website.

If you have a pair of the red/blue glasses kicking around, put them on and let your eyes adjust to them for a couple of minutes, then head to my website www.electricrailroad.com and click on the 3-D link.

The most recent ones I've corrected are in the Vermont subpage. There are some more recent shots I've taken as well. The Goldcoast Railroad Museum subpage has full color anaglyphs.

It helps to have a big monitor to view these. Some of the images are quite large to make the perspective match more accurately.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 03-09-2002, 05:03 PM:

Very enjoyable! I always enjoy 3D pics. Here are some of my own:

This is a picture looking out the window of my uncle's house.

This is an unauthorized 3D pic of "someone's" Century JJ.

The street by Enron Field in Houston TexASS.

Downtown Houston.

These are only a few 3D pics that I have taken. I think I perhaps compressed them a bit too much here. Oh well. Forum member Jeff Skallan has a ton of pics as well that are awesome. Jeff, if you want to post a few here on the forum, e-mail them to me and I'll put them on the FTP so that you can link to them from here like I have.

Posted by Jerry Chase (Member # 660) on 03-09-2002, 05:21 PM:

Cool!

Jpegs will create ghosting if the compression is too great. My original tiffs have very little ghosting but as soon as I convert them to jpegs it starts to show up.

If you use Photoshop, I think 6 is at the lower edge of safe, but I've got to test that out on a few glyphs.

Posted by Joe Beres (Member # 678) on 03-09-2002, 05:59 PM:

Very Cool Guys!

We showed a reel of G.W. "Billy" Bitzer's early 3D experitments a couple weeks ago, so we had some glasses laying around the booth. Joe, do you use a stereo camera set-up of some sort, or do you do your processing in a computer? Question for both of you guys: How, in a computer (I assume you're using photoshop or something similar), do you turn a pair of images into an analglyph?

Posted by Jerry Chase (Member # 660) on 03-09-2002, 08:48 PM:

Sending you my article on how to do it.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 03-10-2002, 01:36 AM:

It's super duper easy!

Just take two pictures of the same damn thing, only move the camera a couple inches left or right between the two shots. If you are taking a picture of something far away, move the camera more. Get your two images into Photoshop. Determine which one is the left and which one is the right. Next take the left image and go into "channels". Select the Blue channel and fill it with 100% black (so that the Blue channel no longer exists). Do the same with the Green channel. Click "RGB" and your image will be all like red and stuff, dude. Now take your right image and do the same damn thing, except just black out the Red channel only. Click RGB again and go back to "layers". Now drag one image on top of the other. Select the blending mode to "lighten" and drag the images around so and adjust as necessary. Flatten your image and save as a HIGHLY compressed JPEG to ensure many artifacts and ghosting. You are done! Easy as pie!

Posted by Jeff Skallan (Member # 891) on 03-10-2002, 03:57 AM:

Jerry, very nice anaglyphs! Joe, I e-mailed a few photos to you for the FTP. 3D photography has become somewhat of a hobby of mine. It is now incredibly easy to do with the invention of the digital camera. In fact, when and if I have the time, I always take 2 shots of everything I photograph just in case I want to later produce a 3d image.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 03-10-2002, 06:49 AM:

Jeff's pics are now on the Film Tech servers. They are pretty damn cool. You'll see them whenever Jeff posts next, and they'll appear as long as Brad doesn't unplug the ethernet cable from the server, which he does constantly (he thinks it's a phone jack

)

I'm also thinking about linking to a 3D image page I designed not long ago for a site called "PixelCraze". 3D is cool!

Posted by Jeff Skallan (Member # 891) on 03-10-2002, 01:28 PM:

OK, here they are:

These are before and after anaglyph photos of our the new stadium seating installation. These photos are designed to have the red filter on your 3D glasses at the left, while blue is for your right eye.

Before:

After:

I created these using a 2 second exposure and converted them to 3D with Photoshop 5.0

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 03-11-2002, 02:53 AM:

Due to the OVERWHELMING demand that I have received from everyone in this thread, I am going to show you some more 3D pictures! But I'm not going to put them here in this thread. Instead I'm going to give you a link to click on.

This is a page I designed for a friend's website. It features 3D pics from both myself and Jeff. I think the pics on this page are pretty damn good. So put on your analglyph red and blue glasses and click here!

Posted by Jerry Chase (Member # 660) on 03-12-2002, 01:16 PM:

FYI, Borders and Barnes and Noble are now selling "The Civil War in 3-D, Volume 2" complete with a prismatic stereo viewer and 139 stereoview images. The book is on the bargain shelf. I picked up four copies at $5 per copy - less than the cost of many throw away magazines. The viewer itself sometimes sells for near that price.

Posted by Jeff Skallan (Member # 891) on 03-18-2002, 02:06 AM:

Thanks for the tip about the "Civil War in 3D" book. We have a Barnes & Noble just across the street from our theatre and while poking around before starting my day, I picked up a copy. It amazes me that photography of the civil war even exists, much less 3D photography! It's astonishing how long the technology has been around.

While looking through the bargain section I came across another amazing book worth mentioning. "TESLA Master of Lightning" by Margret Cheney & Robert Uth ($14.95). Nothing to do with anaglyphs or 3D, but is such a grand view of how one man sculpted literally everything we depend on in our industrialized "modern" world.

Nikola Tesla (1856- 1943) was the inventor of so many things, it's hard mentioning them all. He created the AC power system we've used for well over a hundred years now, X-Rays, radio transmission, remote controlled devices, florescent lighting, wireless transmission of energy, neon lighting as well as endless other astonishing things. Tesla held over 700 patents in his day. This book features 250 photos that showcase quite possibly the most ingenious man to ever live. It's amazing that I was never taught any of this in school! Check it out.
http://www.pbs.org/tesla/

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 03-18-2002, 02:39 AM:

The documentary looks very interesting, only problem are these dates:

— Program Air Times —

WUFT 12/12 10:00 pm
WHYY 12/17 1:30 pm
WCET 12/14 10:00 pm
WGBX 12/14 8:00 pm
KUAT 12/12 9:00 pm
WNET 12/21 10:00 pm
KERA 12/13 9:00 pm
WFYI 12/13 3:00 am
WEDU 12/26 10:00 pm

So ya think these guys are so efficient they know exactly when their show will air 9 months early, or is the webmaster super lazy? Check out WFYI's awesome air time too.

Posted by Joe Redifer (Member # 3) on 03-18-2002, 03:26 AM:

Did the book talk about the Tesla coil? You can even build your own!

Posted by Jerry Chase (Member # 660) on 03-18-2002, 06:52 AM:

I've read at least half a dozen books on Tesla and seen at least four documentaries on him. He was a fascinating inventor with huge ideas. Frankly, I think we are lucky he didn't create an ecological disaster. If he had completed his wireless transmission of power project and somehow found investors to turn it commercial he could have killed the ozone layer, disrupted plant life, created shock hazards that would almost have precluded the development of microcircuitry, etc.

People still argue about the effectiveness of his boundry layer turbines, which in a way shows that he still stands head and shoulders above the intellect of today's average man. However, some of what gets attributed to him was not exactly what he had envisioned. I seem to remember he wanted two frequencies of AC power, one for industrial use and one for lighting. The low frequency power from Niagara was one of his legacies.

Back to 3-D:
The 3-D book is disappointing to me in one way, that the images were not enhanced or corrected to take away the age spots and fading. Showing a few uncorrected for historical interest would have been fine, but IMO the presentation of the images should have been a lot less like copy shots stuck in a book. Still, these 3-D images provide an entirely different perspective to current news. When such a major a historical event as the U.S. civil war can be seen in such detail and immediacy one gets a broader view of recent world events. Seeing the parades in New York and the battlefield scenes during that war puts the WTC collapse in perspective. Compared to the death and destruction of the war between the states, that terrorist act was a minor mosquito bite.

Personally, I'd love to see a 3-D slide presentation of the (cleaned up) stereographs, interspersed with maps and timelines and properly narrated. I'd be willing to bet it would be a history lesson that few students would forget.