Turn an ordinary picture into 3D lenticular print

Turn an ordinary picture into 3D lenticular print

With 3D being on the spotlight in 2010 for the big screens and TVs, advertising and marketing professionals are seeking ways to present 3D on 2D media.

Lenticular printing finds its way to fill this gap. It is a way to present 3D effects on 2D printed media without the need for viewers to wear any glasses. A piece of plastic called lenticular sheet is used to direct light ray to different directions depending on the viewing angle. Since there is an about 5cm distance between human eyes so for whatever objects we see our left-eye and the right-eye automatically form two different viewing angles. It is this fact that human can see the world three dimensionally. On a lenticular sheet there are many lenticules and each lenticule serves as if a convex lens. With careful calibration and design, the lenticules can present different images to the left-eye and to the right-eye, hence give the human brain the illusion of 3D.

The notion of converting 2D to 3D is actually very simple if you understand the principle ofbinocular disparity as described in the last paragraph. But the process is somewhat problematical if there is no help from ad hoc lenticular printing design software. Basically the 2D picture needs to go through the layering process. The result is that objects on the 2D picture will be on different layers of a Photoshop file. Once the objects are layered, a plan view of how far the objects are displaced is then drawn. An imaginative line is then drawn between the background and the foreground to represent the focal plane. This is the plane where the left-eye and the right-eye are seeing the same image. With the focal plane and the objects in place, one will use basic high school geometry to find out how much each object should be moved to the left or to the right when it is projected to the focal plane if it is seen by the left-eye. The same procedure is then done for the right-eye. Once these tasks are done one should get two resultant pictures, i.e. one picture meant for the left-eye and one meant for the right-eye.

The two pictures are then sliced and merged in such a way that when covered by the lenticular sheet the left-eye picture will be seen by the left-eye and the right-eye picture will be seen by the right-eye. Photoshop CS4 and up has build-in lenticular design functions. But if you are using pre-CS4 versions of Photoshop you will need to create the interlacing stripes by yourselves. For those who care to know the fundamentals please refer to the2D to 3D Conversion Tutorial found on vicgi.com. Otherwise using the built-in feature from Photoshop should do the job much easier. In either case, understanding of the principle ofbinocular disparity is the foundation and is of paramount importance.

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