Zoner Photo Studio 13 Professional Edition

Zoner Photo Studio helps you take control of your photos. Acquire pictures from your camera, organize your archive, and edit and share your photos—it’s never been easier!

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3D Pictures

Zoner Photo Studio is a great way to show real objects in simulated 3D. All that is needed is two slightly different photos of the same object and a pair of specially colored 3D glasses.

Turning a Photo into a 3D Picture

A photo is normally a flat representation of a 3-dimensional object. We see the environment around us through two eyes, which allows us to perceive the resulting image as 3D. Each eye sees objects from a slightly different angle than the other eye; the joining of the two “pictures” of each eye gives the sensation of depth. In this way, if you can be presented with a different picture for each eye, corresponding to what that eye would expect to see, then you will also perceive this projection – the picture - as non-flat: it will appear to you to be 3-dimensional. That’s the secret of 3D pictures: a photo that presents to each eye a slightly different, shifted, view of an object.

A composite picture like this can then be viewed through special 3D glasses with one red lens and one blue lens (or more precisely cyan): each eye perceives only the part of the photo that is not filtered out by the colored lens covering that eye. In this way, the mind perceives the image combined from both eyes as being 3-dimensional. The technical term for the composite picture is an anaglyph.

Notes on 3D pictures

Some people with certain vision defects do not perceive 3D pictures correctly, but see them as flat instead, or just see one half. To create 3D pictures, it is necessary to have two photos of the same object, each taken from a slightly different angle (a few inches will do). Photos that were not taken in pairs with a shift in perspective cannot be used to create 3D pictures.