I just thought I'd share this little idea here...
It may come handy to those many, who received the 3D cameras and who also:
- Know a little something about photography
- Have access to Adobe Photoshop (or Elements)
------ or can transpose the below to another image processing software they own.
- Have access to film capable scanner / or can have their lab scan their films (???)
For the rest of folks, to whom the instructions below may sound like Greek (or Geek?), my apologies for taking your valuable time....
So here's the idea - I've been messing around with 3D anaglyph photos for many years using my digital camera to take two shots of a subject and then combine them. If you can indeed shoot a regular roll of film with your 3D camera and have it developed but not printed by your lab, and then scan the negatives: you can do the same!
An Anaglyph is an image you can view in those red and blue 3D glasses they have in many childrens books, or you can buy online pretty cheap (note, link is for 3 pairs).
The bonus would be if your lab could scan them for you. I'm not sure in what form the camera puts things on film, so don't know if the lab will actually be able to scan them, but if worst comes to worst - use your own negative scanning device. My "Epson 4490 Photo" scanner has such capability. Maybe yours too? Or one of these Hamacher Schlemer devices Woot sells every now and then (or whatever they are called) may come handy.
Now to the procedure:
1. Shoot a roll of film. Things to note - bright and vivid blue and red colors in subjects should be avoided, because the way anaglyph works: these colors are only seen by one eye making them very funny and uncomfortable. Alternatively, if you must include them - you can always change the both images to black and white after scanning and have a beautiful b&w anaglyph!
2. Scan them somehow into your computer and determine left and right frames for each shot. This may be a bit tricky at first - but once you get a hang of it you'll know which one is which from location on a film strip.
3. Open the LEFT frame in Photoshop, add a blank layer on top of it and fill it with light blue color that has this RGB value: (0,255,255) or 0 red, and 255 of green and blue each. You can just set these values in color picker in Photoshop. Then set the blending for this new layer to "screen" and flatten the image.
4. Similarly open the RIGHT frame, add a layer, fill it with RED color (255,0,0) and set blending to screen, then flatten.
Now you have your left and right images ready. To test them look through your glasses one eye at a time. When looking at the left image with your left eye (red lens on glasses) you should see it well, but when looking with right (blue lens) you should see a completely blank page and vice versa.
5. Combine the two. You can create a new image and paste these two as layers, or you can just cut and paste one onto another, again as a new layer. It does not matter the order of layers. Then set the blending on whatever layer is on top to "Darken".
6. You're done. Flatten the resulting image and save it under a new file name. Now if you followed the steps correctly - you should be able to see the 3D image in your red+blue glasses!
This sounds like a lot to do, but if you're a little handy with Photoshop - it actually takes a couple of minutes to process an image like that, once you have both frames in a computer.
Unfortunately I didn't get one of these cameras this time around, so I can't test how it all works myself... But if someone benefiting from this post decides to shoot one of their extra cameras my way, please PM me and I'll give you a shipping address!
