From Red and Blue to Side-by-Side: Converting Print Anaglyph 3D to Digital Stereoscopic 3D Pictures

One thing that I love about the current era of affordable and portable computer equipment is how it can be used to resurrect (so to speak) media content from previous eras. In this case, I'm talking about converting anaglyph 3D pictures into stereoscopic pictures that can be viewed through a cell phone and a VR head set.

Since I became a 3D enthusiast since the early '80s, I have assembled a small collection of anaglyph 3D pictures that appear to have depth when viewed through filtered red and blue glasses. One of the books I picked up was Amazing 3-D, which was written by Hal Morgan and Dan Symmes and published in 1982. Not only does this book provide a history of 3D media from the 1830s to the 1980s, but it also includes a significant selection of anaglyph 3D pictures from movies, comic books, trading cards, magazines and still photography. Click here to read the Amazing 3-D chapter on 3D comic books, which was reprinted on the 3D Film Archive site.

I've been tinkering around with my Kindle Fire and cell phone to see if they can be used to play back 3D video content. While I was doing this, I wondered: Could anaglyph 3D pictures be converted into stereoscopic 3D pictures?

A few years ago, I picked up a book called Masterpieces in 3-D: M.C. Escher and the Art of Illusion by Katherine Gleason. In addition to providing a review of Escher's career and techniques, it also provided stereoscopic 3D renditions of many of Escher's paintings. The book even included a built-in stereoscopic viewer so that readers can see the 3D pictures as soon as they pick up the book. As part of my anaglyph 3D conversion idea, I scanned a few of the stereoscopic 3D Escher paintings into JPG files and looked at them on my cell phone through my VR head set. The 3D effect remained; thus, if I could separate anaglyph 3D pictures into two separate, side-by-side (SBS) pictures, then conversion of red and blue print 3D to digital stereoscopic 3D should work.

Stereoscopic versions of M.C. Escher's Other World I (1947, above) and

Sphere Spirals (1958, below).

I first searched the internet to find programs that can filter out specific colors from scanned images. I could not find anything, and the only other options that I could think of that could handle this kind of filtering task were expensive graphic editor programs such as Adobe Photoshop. I briefly considered purchasing such software, but the cost felt disproportionate to what I was trying to accomplish. In other words, I didn't want to apply a $10,000 solution to a 10 cent problem. So, I search for transparent gel lighting filters in red and blue.

Surprisingly, the filters worked wonderfully. I wound up spending a bit more than I wanted to--I had to buy 12 sheet packs of both red and blue filters--but they did exactly what I expected them to do. I used a red filter to scan the left image in monochrome, and then a blue filter to scan the right image in monochrome as well. After making some shading and resolution adjustments (the red filtered images always scanned darker than the blue filtered images), I would arrange the images together and save them as a single monochrome stereoscopic image.

Below are three examples of stereoscopic scans I did of anaglyph 3D images from the Amazing 3-D book. There is some ghosting, but this problem existed within the original images and could not be fixed by the filters. Perhaps someone who is skilled with Photoshop could correct this problem, but I'm not that person.

Above and below: Stereoscopic 3D pictures from Mighty Mouse, 

True 3-D and House of Terror comic books (1953)

While I was doing these stereoscopic conversions, I also took a shot at converting an anaglyph Jaws 3D poster I picked up back in 1983. Unlike the Amazing 3-D images, the Jaws 3D poster is a color picture that had red and blue filters applied to it to achieve the 3D effect. While the poster itself is a good example of anaglyph 3D, the colors used in the poster (varying shades of blue, gray, red and yellow) look a bit off due to the anaglyph filtering. As such, converting this image to monochrome presented a challenge, but I was still able to convert it into a stereoscopic 3D image (see below).

I did this exercise to see if vintage anaglyph 3D photos and artwork could be converted into digital stereoscopic 3D images. I think that there is still plenty opportunities left in this material, and these opportunities are just waiting to be extracted by modern digital technology. For example, I can imagine some of the vintage 3D comic books being re-released as stereoscopic 3D motion comics that can be viewed through a cell phone and VR head set.