Stereo Photo Maker

Stereo Photo Maker displaying picture of Molly Brown's home.

Last week, I covered methods to capture Stereo 3D images. Once you begin creating your own 3D images, you will need Stereo Photo Maker. Stereo Photo Maker is part of a suite of free software that has been developed by Masuji Suto for viewing and editing stereo images. There are versions available for Windows and Mac OS.

The software is very helpful for viewing 3D images because it can open all of the standard 3D file formats and display images using all of the common 3D methods. All of the 3D images that I have featured in this blog were saved by my camera as .mpo files then opened in Stereo Photo Maker to be converted and saved as stereo pairs and stereo anaglyphs.

If you are capturing pairs of images using the cha cha method, Stereo Photo Maker can be used to align your separate images into a single 3D image. You can adjust the relative sizing of the images, vertical and horizontal alignment, and rotation manually, or you can allow the software to align the images automatically.

Stereo Photo Maker is particularly useful for cropping which would be quite difficult otherwise because the crop has to be applied equally to the left and right image views. I find it helpful to capture most scenes zoomed out slightly then crop down to the best composition in the software.

Next week we will cover the stereo window and composing to avoid window violations.