Anaglyph images

Everyone’s seen photographs from the fifties of row upon row of movie theatre goers wearing cardboard glasses with coloured lenses, transfixed by the images they see. Those glasses allowed viewers to get the full effect of movies presented in 3D.

It was the latest craze, one of a number of fads in the fifties and sixties. Viewing 2D images that appear 3D in print and on screen is as popular as ever. There was a cinematic resurgence a few years ago when Jaws 3 was filmed as Jaws 3D and the Amityville Horror franchise created Amityville 3D (now available on DVD as a Collector’s Edition).

There are several ways you can fool the eyes into believing that the projected images on screen have depth, including polarising lenses and interlacing images, but the most common technique is red/blue anaglyph (sometimes red/cyan or red/green).

We’ll leave the technical explanation of how this works until later. Creating custom anaglyph images is usually the reserve of specialist companies, but convincing anaglyph images can be created in Photoshop alone. However, much better results can be achieved with the help of free software, Anaglyph Maker.

So, when Now Wash Your Hands needed to come up with a visual look for its third birthday party, it didn’t take much to connect the words “third birthday” with third dimension. From there, the idea developed until we were printing invites using the tried and tested anaglyph method and giving out 3D glasses to party goers! Although specialist companies still have nothing to fear, here’s a quick and simple introduction to creating those clever and convincing images.