Etude 1 - Technical Research

Right, how does an Anaglyph work?

When you put on the coloured glasses to view the anaglyph the red lens is usually over the left eye and the cyan over the right. The red lens in the glasses make the red areas in the image appear as white and the blue areas as black. In the case of the cyan lens the opposite occurs, it views the blue areas as white and the red areas as black. Then because of the displacement in the images the the lenses makes each eye see a slightly different image the brain then calculates and puts the images together causing the picture to appear 3D.
Technically the only problem with the pictures is that due to the difference in frequencies of the two colours entering the eye, if you just have a standard set of the cardboard red and blue lens glasses, the cyan image appears to be strong and clearer than the red. The red image can sometimes appear to be quite blurry in comparison. More recent glasses have had an slight colour adjustment done on the blue lenses to allow a certain percentage of red colour frequency through in order to combat this problem.

Why Red and Cyan lens?

The reason for the usage of Red and Cyan for the lens and the images is because they are at opposite ends of the colour spectrum scale therefore the colour frequency wavelengths cancel each other out cleanly. If you were to put a different colour lens in such as yellow instead of red there would be a degree of colour from the Cyan image that would get through, so the areas that were Cyan would not appear as black as they would with the Red lens. I would be interested to try this out in order to see whether it makes a more interesting outcome.

So what happens when the image you want to view has a large red or blue content? My assumption is that the area looks as though it is invisible, whilst I'm sure this isn't the idea for conventional work I think that it may make the imagery quite interesting and experimental, I will produce a picture and see how it goes!