Have you ever watched a movie in the cinema where you had to wear some funny red-blue glasses to see the effects? Well, this is called a 3D movie and these amazing effects can be achieved easily with pictures as well. If you want to see what i'm talking about, here's a sample gallery on my website. You'll need red-blue glasses to view it. In this tutorial not only that i'll teach you how to shoot 3D pictures and prepare them with photoshop, but also how to make your own 3D glasses. So let's start our journey into the 3D world!

Part 1 - How do 3D cinema and pictures work?

If you already know an answer to that - skip to the next part. If not - it might be useful and fun to read. Everybody knows that we see the depth in our world because we have two eyes. But why? Why is having two eyes so special? The answer is actually very simple: it's not the two eyes the matter - it's the distance between them. Thanks to the fact that both our eyes are located slightly away from each other, they both see a slightly different view. Our brain interprets both of those views and creates an illusion of depth. So if we take two shots with our camera, each from a slightly different position, we will get two different pictures that our brain would interpret as real world 3D. The only thing we need to do is to view the left picture with the left eye and the right picture with the right one. You can view such situation by a method, called the cross-eyed viewing, but that's not what we want here. What we are trying to achieve is a single picture instead of two. But we need two pictures to view 3D, don't we? In theory - yes, but we can superimpose one image on top of another and get a single image, viewable by 3D glasses. So if we combine a blue and a red image together, our 3D glasses will see a different view from each eye by looking at the same picture. It is because the colors of the glasses filter one of the colors and only lets the other pass. That's exactly what we're going to do, except that we will use all the colors instead of just red/blue.

Part 2 - Shooting the pictures

As i've already mentioned before, what we're trying to make here is two pictures, shot from a slightly different position. That means you need to take a picture of something, move your camera a little to the right (or left) and shoot again. But how much do you move the camera? All the tutorials on the web say that you need to move the camera as much as the distance between your eyes. Wrong! You can't do that and expect a good result with DIY glasses. So here's a tip on how much to move the camera: the bigger is the distance between your camera and the photo subject - the more you move the camera. Basically, if you're doing a macro shot, you'll need to move the camera very very slightly to the side. If you're not using a tripod, your hands are probably shaking and your camera has probably already moved since the time you took the first shot. So go ahead and take another one. If you're shooting a landscape - the distance between the two shots has to be bigger, but not necessarily as big as the distance of your eyes. Trust me, your DIY glasses won't be able to filter the results properly so it's better to keep the distance as low as possible. Here's a couple of shots i made for this tutorial. If you don't have your yet - go ahead and use these:

 
These images are sized to fit so save them and you'll have two times larger images.

Part 3 - Photoshop

Open both images in Photoshop. Activate the left image. Hit CTRL+A and CTRL+C on your keyboard to select it and copy to clipboard. Now activate the right image and hit CTRL+V to paste the left image on top of the right one. You should now have two layers with the separate images like so:

As you can see, i've renamed the left layer to left and the right one is called background. There's also a little lock on the right side of the background layer, which means that the layer is locked. It happens when you open jpeg or other flattened images. So if you see this little lock, simply double-click on it or somewhere near ir (just not on the little preview piture). A dialog box should appear, just click ok and the little lock will be gone. The next thing you want to do is double-click the left layer (also not the preview image). When layer styles box appears, find and uncheck the red channel checkbox as shown below:

Now click ok to close this dialog and you'll see something terrible :) The picture starts to show some red artifacts, it looks blurred. What you're really seeing is an outline of the image with the red channel. And the fact that these artifacts appear means that the two images are different. If these images were completely the same, unchecking the red channed would do nothing. The thing you want to do now is to align the images together. Select the background layer, take the move tool from the tools palette, click on the picture, then, while still holding the mouse button, click and hold the CTRL key on your keyboard. This procedure helps us move the layer without it sticking to the edges and other parts of the image. So move the mouse to position the background layer into the right place. What is the right place you may ask. And i'd answer: it depends. As you can see, there are two objects in this picture, and one of them is closer then the other. You want to move the red artifacts layer to be positioned presicely on the area you want to be in focus in the final image. So if we want to clearly see our chicken in the final 3D - we need to move the background layer until we see no artifacts on the chicken itself. Before actually moving, look closely at the picture where the chicken's eye is. You can see its original eye and then there's another red eye overlapping. Well, let's use it as the reference for this situation. What you need to do is move the background layer until the red eye and the original eye are positioned in the same place (on top of each other). When you do that, you'll see other parts of image starting to show red artifacts. It's ok, only the part in focus will not have red artifacts (and even that might have a part, covered by red). If you can mostly see the chicken clearly with a naked eye - you're almost done. When you make the 3D glasses, you will use them to position the background layer as you like, but for now this method will do as well. Here's what we have so far:

If you look closely at the picture, you will see some part of the original image on the right side (i've pointed to it with two white arrows). In this picture, the part of an original image is not clearly visible, but be sure this part will appear in every image you make (in some it will be seen very clearly). So the last step is to crop this unneeded part. Take the crop tool from the tools palette and select the good part of the image. When you click on the image and start dragging the selection, you can also click and hold the CTRL key to make it more precise and not "sticky". So after selecting the entire left part of the image and leaving the little bit on the right unselected, hit the ENTER key and you're done. Here's the final result (viewable with red-blue glasses):

When you make the glasses, you'll notice that this particular image doesn't have as much 3D as you'd expect so go outside and take some landscape photos or simply photos with more objects / details in them. Or visit my 3D gallery for sample images to test your new glasses.

Part 4 - the glasses

For the glasses, you'll need:
* A printer
* Red ant blue plastic or celophane (or transparent plastic and red-blue markers)
* Scissors
* Glue

Luckily, you won't need to draw the glasses yourself. I've made some cool looking glasses, you can download them and print with your printer.

Download from here

Once you've downloaded the model, print it on a sheet of paper. Now cut out the three separate parts: the main part and the left and right holders. Cut out the eyes from the main part. If you've printed on a simple sheet of paper, use the cut parts as an outline and draw it on a firmer piece of paper. If you have red and blue plastic - great, if you don't - buy some transparent plastic and red-blue sharpie markers (then color the transparent plastic, obviously). Cut out the eye shapes from the plastic so that they were slightly larger than the actual eyes on the glasses. Glue the plastic eyes to the glasses, glue the left and right holders and you're done. Basically all these instructions are graphically presented in the pdf you've downloaded.

Once you make your glasses, have a look at the picture you've just created. If you don't feel enough depth, visit my sample gallery and go make some impressive pictures yourself! I must admin the picture in this tutorial is not a very good one and you'll most likely make much better ones! Good luck and have fun!