Folks, it’s time to dig out your copies of SUPERMAN BEYOND, because this trash is in 3D! (It’s like I want to alienate readers, ha!) And, NO, I will never stop re-purposing this image of Amazing Man lobbing a bull into the stratosphere…

I work a day job at a used book store, where I gleefully run the comic section. This task affords me an interesting perspective on comics, but also I get cool crap from unopened quarter bin fodder! Trading cards, mini posters, pogs, death of Superman armbands, and even 3D glasses. I had an urge to start a collection of all the different glasses when it hit me that an intelligent man with Adobe Photoshop, like myself, could probably figure out a way to make comics look three dimensional. Turns out it took all of 30 minutes to Google up some info an churn out the images you see above.

It’s pretty simple. Just copy the stuff you want in front on the top layer, remove the foreground items from the background wit h the stamp tool, copy the background ‘screen’ a cyan layer over one background (red over the other), merge the respective backgrounds with each color, set them to ‘multiply’, then just nudge the cyan layer left a few and the red layer right a few. BOOM. 3D.

The applications of this kind of thing can be pretty cool. Not only can you achieve depth in your composition, you can use the lenses to filter out one color or the other to create twice the content in half the space (like the trick I pulled in the corner of the logo at the top). None of this is new technology, and this really isn’t even a super creative idea anymore, but it’s something I haven’t seen a lot of in digital comics. Really, digital comic making can take even greater advantage of this simple 3D technique than comics and movies of old. I’m not saying every comic should be in 3D, use it tastefully. It’s like breaking the gutters of a panel, use it only when you need to and when it serves the story and composition best so it can maintain it’s visual potency.

Just for fun, I’ve adapted one of my favorite chapters of Winsor McCay’s LITTLE NEMO to 3D. Enjoy the comic as never before, and I’ll yell at you next week.

Agree, disagree? Questions, comments? Love poems, hate limericks? Want to paypal me wads of digital cash for my brilliance? Email: latino.kyle (at) gmail (dot) com.

-Kyle Latino

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 29th, 2009 at 5:30 am and is filed under News & Views. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.