For more than a quarter of a century, I’ve constantly been testing & refining my methods of presenting the highest quality 3D images possible. I’ve found there are many advantages to the traditional “anaglyph” format: using the correct 3D glasses (red/cyan in this case), anyone with two working eyes can easily view a 3D image of any size, at any distance & from any angle! This cannot be said of any other 3D viewing method, even free-viewing.
The only real drawback of anaglyphs are that they achieve the 3D effect by ‘filtering’ out certain colors, so that the red lens in front of your left eye filters out green & blue, and the cyan for your right eye filters out the reds. This means that a red object would normally appear very bright in your left eye, while simultaneously appearing very dark or blacked out in the right. The opposite would happen with shades of blue/cyan, which would be bright in the right eye but dark in the left. This difference in color brightness between both eyes is known as “retinal rivalry”, and it can quickly lead to discomfort & viewer fatigue.
To avoid the problem, many people choose to just get rid of the color in their anaglyphs altogether, going for a ‘black & white’ approach. While this can be an interesting artistic effect, real life is NOT just black & white, so I set out to overcome this problem. With a series of custom techniques I’ve developed in Photoshop, I can keep almost all of the natural color in my anaglyphs… they’ve even become known as “McManaglyphs” by my 3D colleagues!
You can see in the example above that the original anaglyph (on the left) of this red cactus flower (photographed by Barry Rothstein) has extreme retinal rivalry; close one eye at a time to see how the flower appears to be very bright in your left eye (red lens). “Anaglyph B” in the middle has had some basic corrective color manipulation, but the color no longer appears very normal or natural. The “McManaglyph” on the right has restored much of the flower’s original red color, while at the same time completely avoiding any retinal rivalry!
Take a look at the example below; this view inside a Russian submarine illustrates a classic problem (other than one of national security) – when viewed through anaglyph 3D glasses, the retinal rivalry makes the red in the star appear darker than the blue in your right eye, but in your left eye the roles are reversed, making red look lighter than the blue. Trying to mentally match these differences in color brightness between two things that should appear to be the same causes viewer fatigue. That’s why anaglyphs usually get a bad reputation.
By creating custom methods that, in my humble opinion, far surpass the quality of results obtained by most ‘automatic’ anaglyph-making software, I was able to constantly refine my workflow, incorporating necessary tweaks along the way. I needed to make sure that this works for both computer-displayed and printed anaglyphs, as both are equally important in my 3D world. After being disappointed in the test results of many local photo labs, I finally bought my own printer & developed an effective color management policy from A to Z.
After many years of using (& scanning) slide film for my 3D, I made the inevitable switch to digital. Despite solving a number of problems, working in the new medium certainly created a few new ones. A big puzzler was how to best print & share my work to the rest of the world: since I put so much care & effort into taking the pictures in the first place, I should strive for excellence in the presentation too. Side-by-side stereo images are great, but they require either special lens-based viewers (expensive, relative to paper ones), or the ability to do some optical gymnastics to be able to fuse the two pictures into a single 3D image, which can result in headaches after short periods of viewing. Also, they appear twice as small as an anaglyph when viewing at a comparable width/size, since two (side-by-side) images have to fit into the same space as one anaglyph. One option is to make “lenticular” prints, requiring no glasses at all, but quality suffers a lot and you have to be viewing a specialized print at a very specific angle. When viewing on a computer, ‘shutter glasses’ systems are expensive, yet anaglyphs are easily shared on any monitor or on any printed material.
McManaglyphs are specifically the ‘red/cyan’ kind of anaglyph, since the other (red/blue or red/green) kind don’t include all three primary colors (red, green, and blue). Red/cyan does, since cyan is a mixture of blue & green. Therefore, colors will appear to be more natural… when looking at a white object in a photo through red/cyan glasses, it should still appear to be white, as your brain combines the red from your left eye with the cyan (blue & green) from your right eye. If your glasses make it look too blue or green, then you should probably look for different ones… you’ll be amazed at the increase in quality, and can enjoy nearly universal compatibility when viewing most anaglyphs of the past, present, & future!
Respected 3D expert & stereo photographer David Lee told me personally, when I began showing this process a few years ago, that I’d made the best printed anaglyph he’d seen!
Now that I’ve come up with a worthy mounting process, you can own original 3D photo art of the highest quality. Learn more & check out my newest available creations in the 3D SHOP.