Stereo photos, aligned and finished
Line up a stereo pair, even out its two eyes, set its depth, check it and save it in the 3D format you need - in the same window you view it in, on the 3D screen you view it on.
Table of Contents
Start here
A stereo pair almost never comes out of the camera perfect. Two lenses sit a little higher or lower than each other, one is turned a fraction of a degree, one zooms slightly differently, and the two pictures differ in color. Each of these is small, and each one strains the eyes or doubles the picture on a 3D screen.
Oku3D's photo editor fixes all of it. Press E on a stereo photo, and the tools open beside the picture while it stays in 3D on your display - a glasses-free monitor, a 3D TV, a VR headset or anaglyph glasses. You see every correction in depth as you make it, not in a flat preview.
From a 3D camera
MPO, side-by-side or two files from a twin-camera rig. Align, set the window, save.
From a phone
Spatial Photos and Galaxy 3D photos, or two shots taken a step apart. HDR stays HDR.
From a flat photo
Any photo becomes a real stereo pair from its estimated depth, and saves as one.
Free, offline, no account. The photo itself never changes: you save a copy, or keep the edits in a small file beside it. The Help page lists every tool and key.
Open the pair
Open the photo like any other file. Oku3D recognizes the stereo formats by themselves:
- One file holding both eyes: MPO, JPS, PNS, LIF, side-by-side and top-bottom pictures, Apple Spatial Photos and Galaxy 3D photos (HEIC).
- Two files, one per eye: name them like
photo_L.jpgandphoto_R.jpg(or-left/-right) and they open together as one 3D photo. JPG, PNG, WebP, TIFF, BMP and TGA. - A pair that opens flat or the wrong way round: pick the layout in the bottom bar, and flip Eye Order if the depth looks inside-out. The camera guide covers files with no 3D tag at all.
Then press E, or the pencil button at the bottom left. The 3D tools are in the Stereo group at the top.
Line up the two eyes
The single most important step. A height difference between the eyes is what makes a stereo photo hard to look at, and it is the one thing no 3D screen can hide.
| Tool | When to use |
|---|---|
| Auto Align | Almost always first. Evens out height, tilt, size and keystone between the eyes in one click. If the pair holds too little detail to compare, it says so and changes nothing. |
| Align by Points | Auto Align found too little to work with - a foggy landscape, a night shot. Click a point in the left picture, then the same point in the right one; Oku3D snaps your second click onto the exact matching spot. A second point far from the first also fixes tilt and size. |
| Vertical, Rotation, Size | Fine-tuning by hand, or checking what Auto Align did. The arrow keys fine-tune alignment and depth in small steps. |
| Keystone | One eye's picture is slightly wedge-shaped against the other - typical of two cameras turned inward toward the subject. Horizontal and vertical separately. |
| Turn & Flip | One eye came out upside down or mirrored, as from a beam-splitter rig or a mirror adapter. Each eye turns and flips on its own, under Geometry. |
| Swap Eyes | The depth looks inside-out - the background in front of the subject. |
All corrections of one eye - alignment, keystone, turn, crop, straightening - are combined and applied in a single step, so a full-size export is resampled once rather than once per correction and stays as sharp as the original allows.
Even out the colors
Two cameras rarely agree on color and brightness, and even one camera taking two shots does not. On a 3D screen the difference shows as a flicker or a shimmer between the eyes.
Auto Match Color brings the right eye's color and brightness into line with the left: a color cast, a difference in exposure, and corners that one lens darkens more than the other. It compares only what both eyes actually show, so an object visible from one side only does not throw it off. If the eyes already match, it says so.
The global light and color tools then change both eyes the same way, so they stay matched.
Set the depth and the stereo window
Once the eyes line up, decide where the picture sits in depth - what floats in front of the screen and what lies behind it.
| Tool | When to use |
|---|---|
| Convergence | Sets what sits on the screen surface: everything nearer comes out of the screen, everything farther goes behind it. |
| Auto Convergence | A quick start: puts the nearest part of the scene just behind the screen, so nothing can come out of it and break the frame. |
| Pick Screen Plane in Photo | You know what should sit at the screen - the subject's eyes, the front of a building. Click it. |
| Floating Window | Something near the left or right edge comes out of the screen and is cut off by the frame, which looks wrong. A black edge drawn in front of the picture moves the frame forward; set each edge, its depth and a soft edge. |
| Depth Warp | A single object stands at the wrong distance, or one area needs more depth than the rest. Drag it nearer or farther on a grid over the picture. |
Check it before you save
Depth Scope, a switch in the Stereo group, measures the pair as it is now and shows it over the picture:
- Near and Far: how far the nearest and the farthest point stand out from the screen and behind it, as a share of the picture width, and where they are in the picture.
- A small depth map that stays green while the depth fits comfortably on a monitor or a glasses-free 3D screen, and turns red where it goes past that.
- Window violation marks at the left and right edge wherever something in front of the screen is cut off by the frame - the cue for a Floating Window.
Show the pair as lays the two eyes over each other in one of four ways, each answering its own question:
| View | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Anaglyph | Both eyes as one picture for red-cyan glasses - or, without glasses, how far apart the two outlines lie. |
| Difference | Black where the eyes agree - what sits at the screen - and bright where they differ. A bright band along every horizontal edge is a leftover height difference. |
| Edges | The left eye's outlines in red and the right eye's in cyan, white where they lie on each other. The easiest way to see a leftover height difference. |
| Ghosting | Each eye with a share of the other in it, as a glasses-free 3D screen or a projector leaks light between its views. Shows how much depth survives on such a display before it doubles. |
- Guides lay a grid over the anaglyph, difference and edges views, its lines a thirtieth of the picture width apart - the stereographers' rule of thumb for the deepest a background should go.
- Z zooms to 100% at the pointer, and holding the key beside Enter shows the original for comparison.
Finish it as a photo
The rest of the editor works on stereo pairs as on any photo, always on both eyes alike: exposure, white balance, tone curve, color mixer and color grading, masks by brush, color, brightness or distance, healing and cloning, noise reduction, crop and straighten, vignette and grain, ready-made looks and looks of your own. Lens Blur softens the background by the pair's own depth.
The Help page has the full list and when to use each group.
Save it
Export... at the bottom of the tools, or Ctrl+S, saves a finished copy at full size. Pick the arrangement for where the photo is going:
| Format | Where it goes |
|---|---|
| MPO | Fujifilm and Panasonic 3D cameras, the Nintendo 3DS, most 3D photo viewers and many 3D TVs. |
| JPS / PNS | Stereo viewers and older 3D software. PNS keeps the picture lossless. |
| LIF | Leia tablets and the Leia app, with the depth map included. |
| Side-by-side | Glasses-free 3D monitors, 3D TVs, VR headsets, video glasses such as XREAL. Full width per eye or half. |
| Top-bottom | Some 3D TVs and projectors. Full or half height per eye. |
| Freeview | Sharing online: parallel or cross-eyed pairs for viewing without glasses, or both at once as left-right-left - with fusion dots above the pictures if you like. |
| Anaglyph | Anyone with colored glasses, in the glasses type set for the player's anaglyph output. |
| Separate files | Two files, one per eye, for other stereo software or for printing. |
| 16-bit PNG | Further editing elsewhere, with no detail lost to an 8-bit file. |
| JPEG HDR / PNG HDR | HDR photos, with their bright highlights kept. See below. |
Size is full, half, a quarter or a width of your choice, and the file name suggests the arrangement, such as _2x1 or _anaglyph.
HDR stereo photos
Most photos from a recent iPhone or Android phone are HDR: next to the ordinary picture, they carry what the bright parts really looked like. Oku3D keeps that from opening to saving.
- Opens in HDR: iPhone photos, Ultra HDR JPEGs, gain-map AVIFs and HDR PNGs, as bright as they were saved, on an HDR screen.
- Edits in HDR: exposure and the other tools work on the full range, and the editor's HDR switch takes an ordinary photo beyond white too.
- Saves in HDR: JPEG HDR (Ultra HDR) shows its highlights on HDR screens and looks normal everywhere else; PNG HDR keeps the full range for further editing.
On a screen without HDR, the photo shows as its ordinary picture. Saving in HDR works either way.
A whole card of photos
Open the folder, press E on the first pair, and move through the rest with PgUp / PgDn or the playlist - the editor stays open. Videos and other files it cannot edit are passed over, and unsaved changes are asked about first.
Keep for Later stores a photo's edits in a small .xmp file beside it, so they are there the next time you open it - the photo itself is never touched. Revert to Original removes every edit at once.
No stereo pair? A flat photo
The same editor takes an ordinary photo. Show it as 2D → 3D and Oku3D estimates its depth; Paint Depth then pushes anything that came out at the wrong distance nearer or farther. Any 3D arrangement in Export saves it as a real stereo pair - an MPO, a side-by-side, a freeview pair - that every stereo viewer opens.
Finish your stereo photos in 3D.
Free, offline, no account. Windows, Linux and Mac, on any GPU brand.