I work at a small family owned local photography business. They shoot school portraits and provide photos and products like trading cards for little league sports and dance/ballet schools.

A while back at my day job, I had the idea of providing clients with unique 3D lenticular images.

Read the following on wikipedia for a better understanding of what a lenticular image is. What is Lenticular?

There was a lot to learn with the process. My first couple of tests looked alright in some areas but definitely needed a lot of refinement and practice. I would create backgrounds in layers(in photoshop), and then use a child’s sports portrait as a new layer as well. I would then convert each layer in a stereo view and change the mode to lenticular with the correct settings.

This process worked well enough, but I still felt there was a better way. One that would create a look much more like the 3D blu-ray covers I had seen in stores. This is the look I wanted most of all.

The way I went about achieving this look was through the creation of depth maps. A depth map is a gray scale version of the image painted in shades of black and white. The darkest parts or black, would represent the areas of the image furthest from the “camera” and the lighter or whiter areas represent those closest. All the shades of gray in between represent everything else. This depth map is then used in a frame sequence generator to create 5 unique images. It does this by using the depth map to distort the image. I create 5 images only because the 3D lenticular image lenses I use have 60 lenses. This is the same as 60LPI (Lines per inch). When printing the image out at 300dpi, I have to calculate or divide the 300dpi by how many lenses there are per inch. So I get 5. More or less results in a distorted image that simply does not work and ruins the illusion.

Once I have the 5 new frames or images (in jpg) I use a seperate program that then splices the images together into a single image. Then one printed and put into the 8×10 3D 60 lpi lense frames, the 3D illusion is great. However, how good the resulting 3D image is relies on how good the depth map is. If the depth map is off, the result looks rather odd. Sometimes to test the look and result, I create an animated gif image with the 5 frames to see if I need to alter or modify the depth map. If I have to do alter the depth map, this means I also have to regenerate the 5 frames for the image.

Below are examples of source images, painted depth map, and animated gif to give the general idea of what this looks like in the end. If you’ve ever been to the store and seen the 3D blu-ray covers, you’ll know what it looks like once printed with the plastic lens over the image.

Animated Gif using frame sequence generator with reference image and depth map.

Vigo Reference Image

Painted Depth Map