Written By Steve Patterson

Long before Avatar transported us to the breathtakingly beautiful world of Pandora with its state of the art 3D technology, movie audiences in the 1950's were wearing cheap cardboard glasses and screaming in horror as monsters and aliens leaped out at them from the screen in terrifying red and blue. Photoshop may not be able to replace today's fancy 3D video cameras, but as we'll see in this tutorial, we can easily recreate a retro-style red and blue 3D effect! Of course, since the images we work with in Photoshop are usually flat and two dimensional, we're a bit limited in what we can do with them, but with a little help from selections, we can still pull off something that at least looks like it was taken straight from a cheesy 3D movie. And yes, if you happen to have a pair of those cardboard glasses with the red and blue lenses, prepare to amaze your friends because this 3D effect really does work!

Here's the image I'll be using for this tutorial:

For this image, I want the alien to appear as if he'd be popping off the screen in a 50's movie theater, so I'll be applying the red and blue 3D effect only to the alien himself, not the martian landscape behind him. Of course, we could, if we wanted to, apply the effect to the entire image, but since the image is flat, we really wouldn't be accomplishing anything. We'll get better results by limiting the effect to a specific person, object, alien, or anything else that should be leaping out at you. Here's how it will look when we're done:

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Let's get started!

Step 1: Select The Object You'll Apply The 3D Effect To

As I mentioned, the images we work with in Photoshop are two dimensional, so there's no easy way to completely transform them into 3D. But what we can do is select something in the image that should be jumping out at the audience, like my space alien friend for example, and apply the 3D effect only to that object. To begin then, use the selection tool of your choice (Lasso Tool, Pen Tool, etc) to draw a selection around the object you'll want in 3D. Since the alien's head is made up entirely of smooth curves, I'll use the Pen Tool. When you're done, you should see a selection outline around the object:

Step 2: Save The Selection

We're not going to do anything with the selection just yet but we'll need it later, so let's save it by going up to the Select menu in the Menu Bar at the top of the screen and choosing Save Selection way down at the bottom of the list:

Photoshop will pop open the Save Selection dialog box. There's no need to name the selection or anything, so just click OK to exit out of it:

With the selection now saved for later, press Ctrl+D (Win) / Command+D (Mac) to deselect the object. The selection outline will disappear.

Step 3: Make Two Copies Of The Background Layer

If we look in the Layers panel, we see that we currently have one layer, the Background layer, which is the layer that contains our image. We need to make two copies of the image, one for the red lens effect and the other for the blue lens, so press Ctrl+J (Win) / Command+J (Mac) twice on your keyboard. Each time, you'll create a new copy of the image (make sure you've deselected the object first at the end of Step 2). You should now see three layers in your Layers panel, each one containing a copy of the image:

To make it easier to follow along, let's rename the layers. Double-click directly on the top layer's name in the Layers panel and change it to red. Press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to accept the name change. Then do the same thing for the middle layer and change its name to green blue:

Step 4: Use Levels To Remove Red From The "Green Blue" Layer

With the "green blue" layer selected in the Layers panel (selected layers are highlighted in blue), go up to the Image menu at the top of the screen, choose Adjustments, and then choose Levels:

You can also just press Ctrl+L (Win) / Command+L (Mac) on your keyboard for the shortcut. Either way opens the Levels dialog box. We're going to use Levels to remove the red channel from the image on our "green blue" layer. To do that, first select Red from the Channel option in the dialog box so we're affecting only the red color channel:

In the center of the Levels dialog box is a histogram (the area that looks like a black mountain range), and directly below the histogram are three sliders - a black one on the far left, a white one on the right, and a gray one in the middle. Click on the middle gray slider and drag it all the way over to the right to where the white slider is:

Click OK when you're done to close out of the dialog box. Nothing will seem to have happened to the image in the document window, but if we look at the preview thumbnail for the "green blue" layer, we see that the image on that layer now appears only in green and blue:

Step 5: Use Levels To Remove Green And Blue From The "Red" Layer

Click on the top "red" layer in the Layers panel to select it, then once again bring up the Levels dialog box either by going up to the Image menu, selecting Adjustments and then selecting Levels or by pressing the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+L (Win) / Command+L (Mac). This time, we're going to remove both the green and blue color channels from the "red" layer.

When the Levels dialog box appears, select Green from the Channel option. Then, just as we did with the red channel a moment ago, click on the middle gray slider below the histogram and drag it all the way to the right:

Don't close out of the dialog box yet. We still need to do the same thing for the blue channel. Select Blue from the Channel option, then drag the middle gray slider below the histogram all the way to the right:

When you're done, click OK to exit out of the Levels dialog box. Since the "red" layer is above the other two layers in the Layers panel and we've removed green and blue from the layer, the image in the document window will appear entirely in red:

Step 6: Change The Blend Mode Of The "Red" Layer To Screen

We need to blend our red layer in with the layers below it, so with the "red" layer still selected, change its blend mode at the top of the Layers panel from "Normal" (the default setting) to Screen:

With the blend mode set to Screen, the image will appear back in its original state in the document window. We're ready to turn the image into retro 3D, which we'll do next!

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