Make a 3D image in Photoshop

A 3D image is nothing new, and although it’s generally associated with the big screen, and more recently 3D TV, actual 3D stills, or the illusion of a 3D image has been around for more than a century.

The technique works by placing colour channels, red and cyan, at different positions on a single plain, then when viewed with special glasses, the viewer is given the impression of depth.

Although the science behind how and why is pretty complicated, making your own stereoscopic images in Photoshop is surprisingly easy. Creating one relies on using a black and white image to start with, but after that you can add any number of layers, text shapes and effects as you want, with each element using the same technique to get the 3D image look.

Despite working with a black and white image, we need to work in an RGB colour space. This enables us to split the image into two layers, one with the green and blue channels filtered out and the other with the red.

Once done, shifting the red layer to the left and cyan to the right will push the image back in the perceived 3D plain, switch the direction of the colour channels and that part of the image will come forward.

Using this basic principle, we can get our model to sit in the background and the text in the foreground to jump out of the image.

Click here to watch our video tutorial

Make a 3d image in Photoshop

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2012 at 11:03 am and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.