Many years ago I was hanging out with some friends of mine when one of them produced some colored pencils and a pair of red/green anaglyph glasses. We then spent a fun filled evening trying to draw things in 3D. Had pretty good results. Anyway, I was bitten by the stereo image bug. Soon after that I bought a 1954 Kodak Stereo camera and stocks to make my own slides. Hundreds and hundreds of images later I now want to scan them into the computer and do more with them. For quite a while I was using Photoshop to align the images and tweak them until they looked good but that was taking hours. Then I happened on a bit of freeware called StereoPhoto Maker. It was exactly what I had been looking for. It allows me to make parallel pairs, cross eye pairs, color anaglyphs and other formats that I never thought I’d ever be able to make. The alignment system is simple to use yet powerful enough to fix just about any image you throw at it. I shoot a lot of stereo pairs using the ‘hip switch’ method (stand with your weight on one foot and take the shot, then while still looking through the viewfinder at the subject tranfer your weight to your other foot and take the second shot) because it saves on the cost of getting film processed. In doing this sometimes the images are not exactly on the right axis and need to me tweaked a bit. StereoPhoto Maker steps right up and hits a home run. I have a set of photos on both my TeamDroid gallery and my Flicker gallery that have been made using this program. You can even add a lower third credit to your images if you want. It’s an amazingly handy program, if your shooting 3D images you should take a look at it.
