You can change to top layer back to Normal mode and then toggle the visibility of the layer to get a feel for the 3D effect. ItвЂ™s kind of a weird way to edit it, but you get a feel for it after a while. Black portions of the image have no differences, while white indicates a high difference. I set the top layer to Difference mode and move the layer around until the best alignment is somewhere in the center of the depth of the image.

Next I align the two layers to achieve the best 3D effect. I then move the select box over to the right picture, copy it, and paste it as a second layer in that new image. To start, I use the select tool to copy the left picture and paste it as a layer in a new image.

IвЂ™m just going to give a high-level overview of how I use it - the details are beyond the scope of this post. (Free!) If youвЂ™d like to learn more about using Gimp, there are tons of online tutorials available. I do all my editing in Gimp, which is an open source image editing tool. Somehow our brains process these as 3D two, and you get an actual sense of depth when you look at them. I take these two images and animate them into a gif. (For a completely mind-boggling activity, check out this stereoscopic image I animated of a woman using a stereoscope). These pictures where typically viewed using a stereoscopic viewer that shows each eye one half of the card. Stereoscopes where very popular from the late 1800s until around 1920 or so. This is the same way your eyes view the world you see from two slightly different perspectives and your brain combines the two images to produce a three-dimensional interpretation of what you are seeing. These images were created using a stereoscopic camera, which is a camera with two identical lenses placed far enough apart to give a slightly different view of a scene. This is a scene of Market Street in San Francisco from 1901 that the Metropolitan Museum of Art has made available. Here are a few of my favoritesвЂ¦ 1.I start by finding a high-quality scan of an old stereoscopic image. While I can see both sides, I think itвЂ™s a pretty interesting way to re-purpose existing photos.ДЇrom what IвЂ™ve experienced, the effect is most enjoyable if you focus on the portion of the image which is moving the least вЂ“ where the image appears to pivot. Some people love them, some get motion sick. When I figured this out, I went to town digging through my RAW images from previous flight to create a bunch of stereograms. Well, it turns out the slight perspective change experienced when circling a building via helicopter can produce the perfect stereoscopic frames if youвЂ™re shooting them in quick succession. While I was quickly flipping between two consecutive frame from my recent night flight, I thought it looked a bit 3D, and then I realized I could turn it into a GIF. Any stereoscopic image is called a stereogramвЂ™ вЂ“ via Wikipedia вЂStereoscopy is a technique for creating or enhancing the illusion of depth in an image by means of stereopsis for binocular vision. Chicago Stereograms вЂ“ an experiment with GIFs

Stereogram gifs