Three-dimensional movies and pictures are simple ideas that have been with us for decades.

Just by putting on a pair of highly fashionable red/blue glasses, you can bring images out of your flat computer monitor and into 3D. Anaglyph 3D is created by taking two images from two separate cameras.

The cameras are placed the same distance apart as your eyes, and the same view is taken. The pictures are then tinted – one blue and one red – and superimposed over each other.

When you look at them through similarly tinted glasses, you see each image with a different eye and the object appears to have depth. Put simply, each object in the scene appears twice – once in red and once in blue.

If the objects are a long way away, the red and blue images will be directly superimposed. If the objects are closer, the red and blue images will diverge and the 3D effect will be created.

Producing your own 3D pictures and movies has just become a lot easier. With the massive reduction in the price of digital cameras and camcorders, it’s now quite possible to consider using two identical devices to record 3D pictures or even videos.

Taking Photos

If you want to produce a 3D image, you’ll need two images of the same scene taken by cameras set slightly apart. The problem is that the two cameras have to be exactly the same – the same focal length, the same focus settings, the same aperture and the same zoom.

You can’t get away with putting a Canon on one eye and a Fuji on the other. If you don’t have two identical cameras, you can use the same camera and simply move it a little to the left for the second photo. This will work fine as long as nothing in your image moves between the photos.

People, then, are tricky – unless you can get them to sit very still. You’ll have much better success taking still life images and scenery. Colours obviously won’t come out as well when seen through a blue and red lens, so it’s best to pick shots where composition rather than colour are the main focus of the image.

Also avoid fussy edges. It’s at the edge of objects that the eye becomes most confused when re-assembling the images, so clear, simple lines tend to be more pleasing. If you can, find shots with a clear central focus and depth.

A flat wall isn’t going to work too well, so pick something with definite foreground and background shapes.

Finally, you need to make sure the view is the same in both shots. Keep your eyes fixed on a single point and make sure that point is at the same position in both photos.

It’s best to pick a distant point and keep it at the centre of both images. That way the final composite image will line up correctly.

Your own images

Of course, you can avoid problems with photos simply by creating your own 3D views to work with. If you’re a dab hand with 3D software, simply create two cameras slightly apart within your favourite 3D package and render away.

If 3D modelling isn’t your thing, try creating a basic composite using any 2D paint or image manipulation package. To do this, take a background shot and create two copies of it.

Now bring in a foreground object – either a piece of clip art, or an object cut out of a different photo – and paste it into both photos. On the first picture, move the object to the centre. On the second, move it a little to one side.

The more different the placing of the two objects is, the more pronounced the 3D effect will be when you create your finished 3D composite. The more separated the blue and red images, the closer your eye will interpret the object as being, because the closer a real object is to you, the more your eyes will have different views of it.

Once you’ve created a simple composite with one object jumping out of the screen, you might want to experiment further – placing different parts of the image at different depths to create a more sophisticated 3D picture.

Combining the shots

Essentially all that needs to be done is to tint the two shots red and blue respectively and superimpose them over one another (although, it works best if you make them black and white first).

You can, if you like, do this in any image-editing package. However, there’s a package that will do the job for you. It’s called Z-anaglyph.

The instructions are all written in French on installation, but you can change them to English with the ‘Preferences’ button located at the top-right.

Simply load the left image with the left-hand folder button and the right image with the right hand folder button, and click the ‘generate composite images’ button (the 3D glasses icon).

Your 3D image is instantly created and can be viewed right there and then and saved to disk.

3D video clips

3D video is a whole new ball game. You can’t use the same camera – you’ll need two. However, webcams are so cheap nowadays that there’s no reason why you can’t have two identical ones.

Combining the images from two video cameras is a little more complex than doing it with still images. The principle is the same, but you need to worry about synchronising timings as well as overlaying and tinting the images.

That’s not to say you can’t do it, however, and luckily HeavyMath’s Cam3D is a cheap and reliable tool for automating the process.

We got hold of two Hercules Dualplix Exchange webcams, which allow us to take stills in resolutions up to 2 megapixels (software interpolated) as well as video, so we can use them to record still 3D images or video clips.

We’ve placed ours on top of the monitor a couple of inches apart (you’ll need to experiment a little to get the best 3D effect depending on how far from the monitor you’re sitting).

Loading up Cam3D, you simply choose the left and right cameras from the dropdown list at the bottom of the monitor. This gives you an instant 3D display and allows you to choose whether to record audio or not.

Below this is another drop-down allowing you to set the output file name. We chose to record in avi format and chose cinepak compression because it gives a decent end result – it doesn’t mess our pictures up too much, and it’s also a format we can upload to YouTube should we decide to broadcast our efforts.

When that’s done, you can simply click the ‘Record’ button to start recording. If you’re using the unregistered version, your video will be recorded with a watermark, but you should still be able to produce a perfectly acceptable 3D video.