Ok, so not everyone has two cameras, but most people have one camera!

That's where the cha-cha method comes in handy. It's really great for macro shots where you can't physically fit two cameras close enough to take a good stereo photo. I love how everything looks HUGE in these pictures. A common mistake in stereo is that people go "hey, let's put the camera's far apart and everything will look REALLY 3-D!", and it does. It also makes everything look really tiny, like a model. The brain is always going to assume what you can see is taken from cameras as far apart as your eyes. You want to show everything from the perspective of massive blue people? Put the cameras further apart. You want to feel like you're the size of a bug and everything around you is huge? I know I do, and that's where the cha-cha method shines.

For those who want to know, here's how to make red/cyan anaglyhs (spoiler'd to cut down on rambleyness) The Cicada was taken handheld and required a bunch of perspective correction in photoshop to get it to work across the whole image. The boots are a test of my new lego mindstorms dynamic interaxial motion control rig (more on that later, I promise!) which also works quite well as a manual slide bar (batteries weren't included, so it's not automated yet)

This page from New Zealand of all places is one of the best resources out there. Well worth a look, the macro fungi photos are just amazing.

looks great any spacific minamim megapixal setting recomended

You do lose a bit of detail on the sides when you align and then crop the images, so it pays to take the photos wider than you want the finals to end up. I'm only shooting at one megapixel with an SD handycam (though the poor optics really show), but I shoot in widescreen setting and then crop in to 4:3 so I don't lose any vertical pixels.

thanks will give it a try i once saw it being done by a family member but dident get to ask how to do it lol thanks again

Oh wow, thanks - I like this tip in your spoiler...

I've played around with all manner of stereo3D techniques and I think this is something I've been missing in my red/cyan lens versions. Seems to help fix up unwanted ghosting. If I'm not mistaken a lot of commercial 3D movie DVDs miss this out and the end effect suffers. I'm wondering if it's possible to remix those movies or whether an amount of the ghosting would already be burned onto the blue/green channels.

Here's one of the happy snaps from my trip to Brisbane, taken in the Gold Coast Hinterlands.

I daresay we looked kind of silly taking a photo, shuffling to the side a bit and taking another one while keeping everything perfectly still and aligned, especially when we did this from two viewing platforms on opposite sides of a ravine, we deffinitely got some odd looks from other tourists, but the 3D really gives you an idea of the depth of these places that 2d just won't do.

Thanks to Carpe Rotoscopum for showing me how to set up the anaglyph.

Guess who!

I have no idea who that guy is.

I wonder that too. The theory is sound, but sometimes compression does nasty stuff to colour channels. I think some tests are in order. Once I'm done with holiday snaps...

New camera! Negative paralax shot! He always looks at you no matter where you sit!

Aww - that's so cute!

Another interesting technique is to have the images flip to give a wobble-type 3D effect without needing the glasses. Some people think it gives a convincing 3D effect, others just a dizzy headache.

Yay, wiggle effect! I've always wanted to shoot a music video like that. Just to mess with people.

Yes, it is just like a shaky video and certainly adds no more feeling of depth than a sweeping camera move does. However, it's an effective way of displaying stereo stills for people with little or no depth perception, as it does not require binocular viewing (just a whole heap of imagination) to "get" the effect.

This is one of my favourite wiggle shots ever, from NASA's STEREO probes;



Also, I'd be tempted to align your avatar further behind the screen Lancer. Things that come out of the screen feel a bit uncomfortable, especially if they're touching the groundplane, because that in turn will touch the edge of the image and cause a "window violation" (where things in front of the screen touch the edge of the screen and the brain gets confused about how they're being cut off by somthing that's behend them). James Cameron routinely violates windows, but only with defocussed foliage. All a matter of personal preference and how much you think the audience is willing to forgive really. I personally find a bad window violation to be a jarring as leaving a boom mic in shot. Not that you have that trouble in CG.

Mainly I just wanted an excuse to pull apart the channels and realign it to answer your question from months ago. When I did this it exaggerated the jpg artifacting, because now I've shifted one eye over we're seeing duplicated artifacts. I'm thinking colour correcting ghosty anagylphs wouldn't cause this problem because you're not moving anything around. But, I've just realised there's not enough colour information within the anaglyph to recorrect it. I want the full colour information from the left eye to be able to average it, but all I've got is the red channel.

So no, we can't remix anaglyphs with no anaglyph colour correction, but we can realign them if we enjoy exaggerating compression artifacts.