ANNA GLYPHS

Anaglyph 3D pictures are best made in black-and-white. This is because they deliver red through one eye and green (or green and blue) through the other. The mind does not easily make sense of a yellow, for example, when one eye sees it as red and the other as green.

You can use coloured images with ANNA, but the program will turn them into black-and-white on the basis that green light is twice as bright as red or blue. This is a good, if not perfect, way of generating a greyscale.

You will need to have two pictures of identical size, and using image manipulating software convert them into 24-bit (16,777,216 colour) bitmaps.

You can tell when you have got the correct bitmaps when height (in pixels) times width (in pixels) times three, PLUS 54, gives you the same number as the size of the file.

The right-hand image must be called R.BMP:

The left-hand image must be called L.BMP:

In the same directory you must have ANNA.COM.

Go to the DOS prompt. Make sure that ANNA.BMP is not present in the directory.

Type ANNA and enter.

A check of the directory will reveal that ANNA.BMP has been made. This is the ANAGLYPH picture.

You can now rename it, and save it as a compressed file, either JPEG or GIF. For photographs, JPEG gives better compression - and if the degree of compression is not too high, better quality.

This is the result. The image, by the way, is SIR CHARLES WHEATSTONE - who invented the Stereoscope. His lecture to the Royal Society in 1838 launched the stereoscopic industry.

A disk label and a couple of icons "annaicon" are enclosed with this package.

It is a good practice to create a shortcut to ANNA, and place the annaicon icon on the desktop, start menu or toolbar. Then, if you have many anaglyphs to make - such as for a magazine - you can place the R and L files in the ANNA directory and just click on the icon.

A DOS window will appear, showing whether there was an error. If ANNA has run correctly, you simply close the DOS window and return to the imaging software.