Sabrina 3D

Picture Post, 29 October 1955

Picture Post Presents

COLOUR 3-D

Here for the first time, in any newspaper or magazine, are three-dimensional colour pictures. They are the result of years of research by Leslie P. Dudley, on his Anachrome process.

DO you notice anything strange about the picture in an advertisement in the opposite page? It doesn't seem to be up to our usual high standard of colour printing. It looks a little bit fuzzy—or, as a photographer would put it, "slightly out of focus". This is something in the nature of a deliberate mistake. That slightly-out-of-focus impression hides something revolutionary in photography and printing — the first three-dimensional colour pictures ever to appear in any newspaper or magazine.

With this issue of Picture Post, you have been given, free, a pair of spectacles. After studying the 3-D pictures for a little while, use the spectacles, and the petrol station scene opposite and the pictures of Sabrina and Terry-Thomas on pages 32 and 33, and the new Vauxhall car on page 36, will spring to life. As the 'how to view' directions explain, it takes a few seconds for the eyes to become accustomed to looking through the red and green filters in the spectacles.

Since the first ordinary 3-D photographs, of the type known as anaglyphs, were produced, more than a hundred years ago, many inventors have tried to produce such pictures in colour. Their efforts met with little success, until about ten years ago, when Mr. Leslie Dudley developed a process capable of producing fairly good results on 16 mm. film. Not until recently, however, was he able to produce an optical system for taking 3-D colour pictures on larger film, so making these reproductions possible.

The process can be used for motion pictures and for 'live' television. Plans have, in fact, been made for the first colour 3-D television in America by this process early next year. All the Anachrome pictures in this issue, and the ones that will appear for the next two weeks, were taken by Carl Sutton, who has for some months co-operated with Leslie Dudley on this new system.

Terry-Thomas and Sabrina put

THE CIVIL WAR IN NEW PERSPECTIVE

Photographed by Carl Sutton

Every man has his pipe-dreams - even if it takes a cigarette holder to evoke them. Through a haze of smoke, Terry-Thomas sees himself as a seventeenth century cavalier, called to defend Sabrina against a pack of Puritans.

INTO MY DREAMS. I stand - a gallant, by Vancyck - amongst the Roundhead soldiery. And there amongst them, too, is a girl. She is, somehow, familiar, but why is she there? Anyway it is clear that I must rescue her (below) - come what may.

A MOPPING UP OPERATION. I triumph, naturally. In due course, the last Roundhead is dead. I flick a length of ash from my cigarette. Now for my reward.

AND YET - you know what dreams are. My reward never came. I can only think of the words of another gallant, Sir Philip Sydney: "O, make in me those Civil Wars to cease."