illustration

This is very cool. You can now create 3D images on Facebook via browser.

Previously Facebook 3D images could be done with iPhone cameras that had portrait mode but now you can upload them yourself using your browser facebook application.

You just need to create a depth map of the image you want to 3D-ify. I tried it out using my clocks going forward cartoon.

You simply build up areas of your image in shades of grey, the darker the area, the “further back” it will be in the final image. The writing in white will appear in the “foreground”.

I just built this up in layers and flattened it at the end. You save both as png or jpeg (I used png here) and save both with the same file name, except you amend “_depth” to the name of your depth image. For example
sun.png
sun_depth.png
The underscore is important here.
Then you upload both as a status on Facebook in your browser, and Facebook automatically combines them!

Very cool! (The embed might not work on every browser but if you’re reading on a desktop computer you should see the effect.)

I’d seen these pop on Facebook and I thought there was third party software involved where you define planes using polygons and layers and the program extrapolates data from each layer to fill in the detail “behind” the foreground subject but it’s actually a much simpler process! Was fun figuring out how grey something should be for its “distance”. If you look at the treees in the midground you can see I even gave the ones in the background slightly more depth than the trees in the foreground. I’m not sure of the applications for this other than a cool thing to try but sometimes that’s enough!

via Antti Karppinen Photography, Alias Creative Turn your composite images into Facebook 3D images without iPhone | Antti Karppinen Photography, Alias Creative