Stereoscopic Pictures

[ffutures]

A few days ago I found a volume of The Royal Magazine, dated 1900, which ran a rather interesting feature. For each of the six months covered by the volume there is a "Stereoscopic Gallery" of six pairs of pictures, ranging from militaria to tourist pictures. My plan is to include all 36 on the next release of the Forgotten Futures CD-ROM, accompanied by versions modified to be viewed with red-green glasses - there's a rather nifty Windows freeware program called StereoPhoto Maker that does this conversion reasonably easily.

Here's the first picture, as a stereo pair - to view it sit well back and try to fuse the left and right images by crossing your eyes - and as a red-green image; since the pictures are large files they're behind a cut. I'll probably end up converting everything to jpg files to save space if that doesn't eat too much quality; at the moment the pair is a gif and is too big to go on Photobucket. All comments gratefully received.

And yes, heliograph, this really was the first picture...



Signalling with the Heliograph

Comments

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

At least the first image converts to an average-quality (factor 75) grayscale JPEG of 108kb with no visible changes whatsoever. At a JPEG quality factor of 45 (81kb file) one can tell that there are differences by switching between the pictures at high speed, but the original is so grainy that it's impossible to tell which is the JPEG and which is the GIF just by looking at them. Not until quality factor 20 does it get easy to tell which is which, and then the file is down to 23kb.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks - then it looks like I can save them as jpg once I've edited out the spots etc., which is good news. It'll also let me put some of them onto my web site, journal, etc. without eating too much space.