Chapter III

All color screens are stereo ready

Computer's images are displayed on color screens and those screens use the RGB (Red, Green, Blue) system to create the color of each pixel of the image.
That means all computer's images are made with three bands: a red one, a green one and a blue one.
Suppose now we have tools to take only one color band from an image.
If we take the red band from the left image and the blue band from the right image, we will just need a tool to glue those two bands together and we will have a computer anaglyph giving black and white stereo when wearing red-left and blue-right glasses.

Numerous software to manipulate images and to translate them between the different formats can be used to process the color bands and produce 3D (PhotoShop, PaintShopPro, The Gimp...).
You just need tools which allows the separation of bands and which allows black and white bands to be glued back as color bands; thus producing a color image.

If you rush immediately to convert your own stereo pairs into red-blue anaglyphs by playing with the RGB bands you will probably be deceived.
First, you will only have magenta and white stereo images, not really black and white ones (Red + blue = magenta).
Secondly, stereo images are definitively not flat images and special manipulations have to be applied to them for correct viewing.