Making a Traditional Anaglyph Image from a Single Shot

My husband and I went to see a RealD 3D movie today. After I got home, I wondered whether there was a way to make images in Photoshop that would look 3d when viewed with the RealD 3D glasses we ***didn't*** recycle at the end of the movie. After all, the movie looked like a 90-minute ViewMaster reel.....

After some Googling, I realized that there is no way to simulate the look, due to a complex polarization technology. This led me back to playing with traditional red-cyan anaglyphs. While there are many DIY tutorials out there (more than a few which are unnecessarily complicated), the one I used at PhotoKaboom is pretty intuitive.

Here's the result (you'll need the old-fashioned 3d glasses with one cyan lens and one red lens to see it properly):



Your mileage may vary. (Note that because I didn't have the same version of Photoshop as the author, I did not distort the layers before moving the cyan one.)

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