Make an Anaglyph in StereoPhoto Maker (Red-Cyan & More)
An anaglyph squeezes a stereo pair into one image: the left view goes into the red channel, the right view into cyan, and a pair of red-cyan glasses separates them again for your eyes. It is the cheapest 3D viewing method there is, and StereoPhoto Maker has a dedicated anaglyph maker with more control than most. You need an aligned pair first — if yours is not aligned yet, start with the beginner tutorial.
Create the anaglyph
- Open your aligned pair in SPM.
- Switch the display to Anaglyph mode and choose colour or greyscale anaglyph.
- Use the gamma correction option if the two eyes’ brightness feels unbalanced — mismatched brightness is a common cause of the shimmering “retinal rivalry” effect.
- Check window edges: subjects cut by the frame edge in anaglyph can produce colour fringes; adjust the stereo window if needed.
- Save the anaglyph as a copy (File > Save Stereo Image). Keep your side-by-side master untouched.
Colour, greyscale, and Amber/Blue
SPM offers Red-Cyan, Red-Green and Red-Blue anaglyph configurations, plus Yellow-Blue (Amber/Blue, the ColorCode-style system). A greyscale anaglyph sacrifices colour but often looks cleaner, because colour differences between the two views are a major source of ghosting. Saturated reds and cyans in the original scene are the worst case for any anaglyph — no setting fully rescues them.
Reducing ghosting
Ghosting — a faint double image — comes from glasses, screen and image together. In the image itself you can: align precisely (auto alignment), apply gamma correction, and avoid extreme contrast at depth edges. The full diagnosis list is in the anaglyph ghosting guide.
An anaglyph is a viewing format, not an archive format. Always keep the side-by-side master; you cannot cleanly recover the original pair from an anaglyph.
You will need glasses to check the result: red-cyan anaglyph glasses cost very little and work with every anaglyph on this site.
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