Anaglyph Settings
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Dialog Box: Anaglyph Settings [ Display Menu]

Rotation angle. This is the angle by which each of the views is rotated away from the non-stereo position. This angle is the same as the angle for separate stereopair views, which is also set in the Preferences dialog (Settings menu).

View colors and Background . The colors of the two images are completely different depending on the background. For screen viewing, the background is normally black, and the left-eye image is red, while the right-eye image is blue, green or cyan. Which of the latter three colors works best depends on the particular glasses you are using. The color of the combined, 3-D image is white, violet, or yellow. In most cases, images on the screen work best with red-cyan rather than red-blue.

For printed images, the background is normally white, and the right-eye image is red, while the left-eye image is green, cyan or blue, again depending on the glasses. The color of the combined, 3-D image is normally black.

Anaglyph drawings can be shaded, but the color will be ignored and the crystal will be shown as white. On the screen, if the color where the two images overlap is not white, try changing from red/blue to red/cyan or vice versa.

It is certainly possible to use a white background on the screen, but a black background for printing is not usually very satisfactory, because of bleed (widening) of the black background pixels onto the colored lines. Lines must be many pixels wide to avoid this problem.

The success of the 3-D image relies on proper combination of colors during drawing. When part of the right-eye image is superimposed on part of the left-eye image, the colors must be added, instead of the right-eye image just replacing the left-eye image. That is, where a red image and a blue or cyan image coincide on a black background the color should be white (or violet), instead of blue (or red). For Windows, this appears to be done incorrectly for 8-bit (256-color) screen modes and correctly for 16- and 24-bit screen modes. Color combination for index Labels does not seem to be done correctly even in the 16- and 24-bit screen modes. However, these aspects may also depend on the particular graphics card installed in your machine. For printing, the rules for combining colors are completely different, and the results you get may depend on the printer driver and printing mechanism.

In summary, you may need to experiment with the View colors and Background settings to get the best results.