Specialist Study 1 - 3D Photo

Having used after effects a little in my second year at university, i had a little understanding of the program, however, this is as far as it goes, my knowledge of after effects at this stage is VERY basic....

Because of this i wanted to start of with something basic also, ive tried jumping into "Advanced Tutorals" before, and yes i may have been able to get what i had wanted done (at a much lower standard then what id have wanted), however,  I feel like this is not a good way of understanding and learning a program. Through looking for videos and animations, i discovered many people were using photos, and experimenting into making them appear 3D. 

I thought that this would be a good way to start my research into using 2D images into creating 3D pictures as it appeared to be a basic form of this style.

This is a tutorial i used to help me in creating my own 3D photo, you can also find it here at http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/virtual_3d_photos/

Video Copilots Andrew Kramers tutorials are incredibly popular throughout the  world of effects and animation. 

This is the photo i used to create my image, i would first begin by opeming the picture in photoshop, and then seperate the image into different layers.

As you can see here i have separated this layer from the background, and even removed the fravestone in the foreground. I used the clone stamp tool to fill in where i have removed the grave stone, taking leaves from another section of the picture to fill into the space left behind from the grave.

I also separated the gravestone to the left of the tree.

I then imported the Photoshop file containing the different layers into after effects. I separated the layers into 3D space and played around with how far i pushed the images from each other in order to create the appropriate effect to the picture.

This was my result:

I was pleased with my 3D photo, however i noticed a flaw with the gravestone towards the left of the tree. As i had zoomed into the picture, blank space began to appear below the gravestone, where i was revealing more of the image, however as there was not enough of this image it was visible that i had cut it out, and stuck it into 3D space. Through this test i realised that i should use/create more of the image when separating layers. Let me explain, if i had used the clone stamp tool to create more leaves and ground below the grave, the flaw of the floating grave should not have happened, as fallen leaves would appear in place of the black space.