Understanding Anaglyph 3D

Anaglyph 3D

Anaglyph 3D

Anaglyph 3D is the stereoscopic 3D effect achieved by means of encoding each eye's image using filters of different (usually chromatically opposite) colours, typically red and cyan.

The oldest known description of anaglyph images was written in August 1853 by W. Rollmann in Stargard about his "Farbenstereoscope" (colour stereoscope). He had the best results viewing a yellow/blue drawing with red/blue glasses. Rollmann found that with a red/blue drawing the red lines were not as distinct as yellow lines through the blue glass.

In 1858, in France, Joseph D'Almeida delivered a report to l'Académie des sciences describing how to project three-dimensional magic lantern slide shows using red and green filters to an audience wearing red and green goggles. Subsequently, he was chronicled as being responsible for the first realisation of 3D images using anaglyphs.

Anaglyph 3D images as defined by D'Almeida contain two differently filtered colored images, one for each eye. When viewed through the "color-coded" "anaglyph glasses", each of the two images reaches the eye it's intended for, revealing an integrated stereoscopic image. The visual cortex of the brain fuses this into the perception of a three-dimensional scene or composition.

Advantages

The main advantage of Anaglyph 3D is that it is a cheap and easy way to experience 3D.
The glasses are not expensive and can be used on any regular screen.
Anaglyphs can be any size from very small to very large. Also, since the two images are superimposed, they take up half the space of side-by-side images.
You can view anaglyphs in books, as prints, projected with a 2D digital projector, and displayed on standard 2D TV screens or computer monitors. Anaglyph movies can also be played using any player.
The images can be viewed without special hardware and software other than the glasses.

Disadvantages

Anaglyph images tend to look dark, muted and desaturated, especially reds, because the coloured lenses used to view the images remove and alter the light passing through them. To offset this to some extent you can increase the brightness of the light under which you view prints and turn up the brightness on your computer monitor.
They look odd in 2D when not wearing anaglyph glasses.
They can't be reproduced in black and white because colors are needed to direct each image in the stereo pair to the correct eye.
Best results are achieved when images are prepared for a specific display and specific glasses. This is a problem since a lot of people then view them on-line through widely varying cheap glasses on displays with poorly adjusted colours.

MAKING GLASSES

If you can't find a pair of anaglyph glasses you can make some out of red and cyan (or blue) acetate that you can find at a crafts or art supply store. You can even use clear acetate and colour it with broad tipped red and cyan (or blue) marker pens.

History

A stated earlier Wilhelm Rollmann is credited as the first person to illustrate an anaglyph, and he published his invention in 1853. He illustrated this by using red and blue glasses to view yellow and blue images. However, Rollmann’s technique only worked on line drawings.

In 1891, Louis Ducos du Hauron created the first printed anaglyph. Hauron’s process involved printing two negatives (which formed a stereoscopic photo) onto the same sheet of paper. One of the negatives was printed in blue or green while the other negative was printed in red. Then, the viewer puts on a pair of colored glasses to view the printed image. The red color was used for the left eye and blue (or green) was used for the right eye.

Two things are certain: one, that every piece of new technology will be jumped on by pornographers; and two, that as soon as that technology is invented, someone will try to find a way to improve it.

The stereoscope is voyeuristic by nature and was quickly used to view nudity. The three-dimensional illusion was often enhanced by delicate hand tinting that delighted the amateurs of the genre. Soon a booming industry appeared that specialised in the making of “academies” and more graphic images for the stereoscope. Most of the production of the pictures (mostly daguerreotypes), which were deemed “indecent,” took place in France from the early 1850s onwards.

When censorship was reestablished by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte in 1852, photographers who failed to copyright their work and those who dealt in reprehensible prints or plates were fined and/or sent to prison. After a few years of being simply told off, then fined, many of the male and female models who sat for these images were also incarcerated. If men usually bore their fate with equanimity and sometimes pride, it was more difficult for women who lost everything, were ostracized, and soon had no other alternative than to revert to prostitution.

The stereoscopic photography of the late 19th and early 20th century developed as an attempt to add realism to the still-new world of photography, adding depth and realism – or at least a gimmicky approximation of realism. And the nude photographers and pioneering pornographers of the era, ever keen to make their images more lifelike and appealing to the voyeur, were quick to jump on the idea of stereoscopic images, especially as the quality of photography at the time was often rather basic. Anything to improve it was welcome.

Anaglyph images became popular for nude photography in the 1900 when the two parallel images started to be combined. At first these images were studio based and often posed like paintings.

But some photographers moved the models outside the studio.

Of course in the early days the images were shot anonymously and featured uncredited models often found in brothels, these photographs are a charming example of smut from the days when such material was strictly forbidden.

The respectable pioneers of French photography, Auguste Belloc and Felix-Jacques Moulin for example, ran lucrative occult trades in pornography. Often these pictures were described as "artistic nudes" and were registered at the Bibliotheque Nationale as study materials for painters. Delacroix himself used Eugene Durieu's nude photographs.

Some images were sold with a simple viewer.

It also became popular in both parallel and anaglyph images to create peeping tom images.

Oscar Barnack's 1926 Leica camera changed the way all photographers worked: it was compact, fast, light and its cassette of film allowed multiple shots without re-loading. This new mobility was a catalyst to creativity in sophisticated erotic photographs

A result in the 1920s there was an explosion of nude images in all formats.

Soon 3D became a movie reel. What the Butler Saw is a mutoscope reel, and an early example of erotic films dating from the early 1900s based upon the peeping to theme. It depicted a scene of a woman partially undressing in her bedroom, as if some voyeuristic "butler" were watching her through a keyhole. The film was seen by depositing a coin in a freestanding viewing machine, which then freed a hand-crank on the side which was turned by the viewer. Social standards are subject to change, and by the 1950s this and similar films were considered harmless when compared to contemporary erotica.