3D photography and possibly video.

[incony]

i see such excellent photography here, from very skilled and perceptive creative artists, that i wondered if any had considered anaglyphic 3D photography. its old hat, ( nothing new ) its been around soon after photography came into being, and uses several methods)
One, uses two images taken from each eye position, about 2.5 inch parallax apart and then displayed in a Holmes type viewer,
The one ive considered is also well known, and uses the same principle as the Holmes viewer method but combines the two viewpoints
as one image, using red and cyan bias for each.. These are the well known 3D glasses principle.

I create panorama images, and ive thought about creating some red cyan anaglyph 3D panoramas..

i`m just venturing still, ive not made any yet..

Since this is a photography part of the forum i though any ideas and methods were worth sharing... summer is nearly here and the great weather prompts me to get out the tripod... and make some more local panaramas.

[tristanlong]

Hiya, yes i have produced some anaglyths, using 4 photoshop layers and they work pretty well. These samples were the tests.

[incony]

what was your own perception, the first time you created such images tristan? do they still take you there?

[tristanlong]

Hiya, yes I still produce some, sometimes when I shoot a wedding I produce the back section of the wedding book as a 3D section and supply 2 pairs of specs, the happy couple loves them as it's something different.
The picture of Rick Parfitt from Status Quo you see above, the Quo's office team loved the idea of Quo in 3D.
I look at 3D as I look at HDR, some images work and some don't, I find sometimes it's best to shoot a selection with a view of 3D conversion.

[incony]

immediately i have a problem:

i have the Roxio Video Lab suite. which has the ability to create 3D ( Red Cyan ) images from 2D photographs or video.

it has some samples which work fine..

so i put on the red cyan glasses and look at your pics above.. nope no depth , no 3D.. i am not sure why.

i tried also , to see if one of my existing panoramas would work, and that wasnt successful either.. so i am going to have to learn some methods...

The idea of 3D appeals.. but i sense there is a learning curve this link for example has pics which worked for me using red cyan glasses

http://thepanoramablog.blogspot.com/2009/04/stereo-3d-high-resolution-panorama.html

and this one a real sense of depth.. i want to create anaglyphs like this..

http://static.foto.no/linkeddata/bildekritikk/images/574000-574999/574521_1280x1024.jpg

i am going to see what other folks have done on the web...

[incony]

Today, i put together two fujitsu z130 12mp cameras on a metal framework, to fit my tripod, and created my first red /cyan 3D anaglyph.

nothing special, i wanted to see how it would work.. and i got this :




This is a resized image , and you need red cyan glasses to see it in 3D

I am happy that the method works.. it worked for me, though i see much to improve.. and i will be... and i will be posting some more info.. on how i got the two cameras to be able to be used on a tripod, and the free software that i found very good at editing the final results..

the main editing software:

http://stereo.jpn.org/eng/index.html

and the kind of images i want to make:

http://www.stereomaker.net/panorama/panoramae.htm

though i seek to create interleaved images viewable by switchover glasses for 3D TV..

[incony]

Today i took my first 360 degree panorama images in Hunstanton.
Using the two fujitsu 12MP AV130 cameras, on the mechanical assembly i made to fit my Tripod.

each camers lens is on exactly the same horizontal line centre as the other, and 2.5 inches apart ( ones eye iris centre apart).
Both cameras are @ 3 inches from the tripod nodal point.. ( its centre turning circle ) and that is because ones spine nodal point is about that distance from ones eyes)

In effect.. its a triangle, spine centre, left eye centre and right eye centre.

That means that the eyes travel in a tangent around a circle that has the spine as its centre.

In the past, ive created panoramas using just one camera, and its lens, is directly centred on the nodal point.. it shares the same point..

Ive used Hugin , a free program to make those panoramas, but this time, using two cameras, Hugin couldnt easily do it.. it doesnt like the parralax created by using two cameras turning on a circle...

but this program - AutoPano : http://www.kolor.com/
did it with no problem.

I downloaded the trial version, because, it costs £166 to buy..

But it made such an excellent and easy job, of creating the pano, that i am going to buy it.

each image, ( left and right )are 26000 pixels wide and 4000 high..big images... but as near perfect merging and integration as i could want.. it was hard to find any defects.. imagine one is combining 16 images, including looking directly at the sun.. , then you can see that in several directions , the light and shadow changes for the camera, and so do the images. but AutoPano did it in seconds.. while Hugin stalled and faltered ..

So.. i got my left and right Panos.. and got Photomaker to create a red cyan anaglyph.

it was really good to do that..

Ive still some fixing to do, to get the mechanics correct on the tripod.. minor variation dont matter for using just one picture, but when one is using 16 overlapping pics, for each camera, then each camera must be seeing as near as dammit the same height and distance and width.. else cumulative errors around the 360 degrees matter..

for example imagine one camera len is true 90 degrees vertical and the other is 89 looking south and 91 looking north.. and somewhere in between at east and west,, that error, means that the far distance error is large, and distant objects like fences or poles or the horizon will not be true in both cameras, and that means the anaglyph wont true up.. ghosting will occurr where the error is worst.

[EWW]

Well done incony. After a long trip like yours back from Haifa all I would
want to do is kip. Hope the experiments continue to go well for you, looks interesting.

[incony]

These links are the first two panoramas i took using the dual camera method

They are reduced here by 75 percent.. to under 1MB - since the originals are over 22 MB.

http://www.incony.org/webpics/hunstanton1left6x1thou.jpg

http://www.incony.org/webpics/hunstanton1right6x1thou.jpg

If you load both picures into an art program or a viewer, and can zoom in,
then you will see that its very hard to see the 2.5 inch horizontal tangent
present between the two pics.

even having the originals to study, as i have, - and both are over4 times the size of these reduced pics,
its difficult to say .. one gets down to pixel difference as the eventual horizon
distance is approached. ie you cant see any noticeable difference in the
two pictures then.

What was immediatly obvious to me, was that both cameras were not exactly parallel and square.

There is also the difference in the horizon curve present.. but i see that curve naturally draws the eyes to the lighthouse.
hhmmm. An error can be fortunate, and be beneficial... i think the HSE should study that..

so i need a much more secure mechanical mount for the cameras.. since difference makes a
big consequence.

I am therefore having to work on paralelling and truing up of both panoramas.. to match. But i still have that
difficult to see 2.5 inch difference.. to preserve..

Perhaps i should have knuckled under and just paid for a dual lens camera.. but hey, i am not so easily
discouraged in discovering "how" i can do this myself..

When i have a good viewable anaglyph, of this view of hunstanton.. i will update...

[incony]

Ive also found that my old faithfull, PTviewer that i embed in web pages doesnt like windows 7, and the other free sources using
java, are giving me a hard time too..

I want a panorama viewer i can embed or link to, that has the means to live zoom in and out... like ptviewer could

Ive looked at using this, since the page works in windows 7 64 bit.. using explorer 64 bit..

http://javascript.internet.com/miscellaneous/panoramic-image-viewer.html

but ive downloaded the script and created a web page using it as written... and i cant see sod all... all the pictures are just red x .... so ive got to use the link above as a source code to create a web page, and remove all the bits i dont want, and use the bits i do.. life used to be so easy, everything just did what was described... now i have to be an investigator all the time..

so its going to take me a while to get my http://www.incony.org web page panoramas viewable again, since ive got to recode them all.. they dont work right now.. internet explorer wont show them.. life sucks.. so much for windows 7 ultimate... xp worked fine..