The documentary abotu Robert Evans, “The Kid Stays in the Picture” is the first place I really noticed it, a certain way of taking a still photo and pulling the subject of the photo out from the background so that it creates a kind of 3-D effect.
Does anyone know what this kind of effect is called, and if there is any software that facilitates doing it, especially on a mac? Or a tutorial or something?
Are you referring to “extruding”? I’m not sure if this is what you’re describing, without actually seeing it.
The only way I can think of doing that is to set your camera to center (or custom spot) focus with the focal subject a fair distance from anything and don’t use a zoom lens (it diminishes the sense of distance). This would keep the subject in sharp focus while rendering the background in a soft blur, creating a nice depth-of-field.
Thanks, but no, this is work that was done with old photographs. It’s a technique that has been used a lot since that film.
I’m a bit confused. Do you mean you’ve seen it done with old photographs as in:
“Back in 1960, someone took a photo and it had this cool 3D effect.”
Or do you mean:
“Someone took an old photo from circa 1960 and made a cool 3D effect for it on their computer.”
It’s used a lot on 48 Hours on CBS.
I don’t know what it’s called.
I know the effect you are talking about, but if it has a commonly used name I don’t know it, and it seems my google-foo is too weak to find it. For lack of a something better I would call it Motion Stereoscopy.
I’ve seen this effect used more and more, and have also idly wondered what it was called and how they created it. For those not familiar with this effect maybe I can describe it a little better: The subject of the photo is cut out from the background of a regular 2d image, and motion is applied so that the background moves relative to the subject in such a way as to give the illusion of perspective. The part that I always notice is that throughout the motion parts of the background that were hidden by the subject come into view. I’ve noticed very obvious examples of this where the subject is clearly just a cut-out 2d part of the image, and other more subtle examples where it seems they’ve chopped up the image into multiple planes of view.
I think the easiest method to duplicate this would be to use multiple images, one with a rather flat background and the other with only the subject. In your favorite animation program just play with the motion of the two images until you get the perspective right.
If you only have one photo I think you would need to either draw in the missing background image from where you removed the subject, or shrink the background so that you had some overlap to work with.
I made a quick example to demonstrate this effect: Example MPEG (3.6 MB).
Stoid, this was made with a combination of Photoshop and Adobe Premiere Elements, both of which are available on a Mac.
After cutting out the foreground subject and placing it into a new layer, you carefully clone the background into the area “behind” the subject just enough so that there is enough overlap that small amounts of movement can be achieved.
Ken Burns popularized the technique in his documentary The Civil War, and this is the method I heard in a ‘making-of’ some time ago. It’s sometimes called “The Ken Burns Effect.”
No, the Ken Burns effect consists of panning and zooming across a still photograph. There is no cutting out, cloning, or any manipulation of the photography in the technique.
The History channel has really taken a liking to this technique. I thought that they cut out the “frontal” item and blew it up a little. You notice that they never show the background sliding past for more than a second since there’s not much overlap. It is a very cool effect, but in danger of becoming overused.
You’re right. :smack: I was getting confused in my search for a name for this technique. It was called “Ken Burns on Steroids” on one site and I mucked it all up plus I was sure I’d seen it before The Kid Stays in the Picture.
Now I feel stupid. 
There isn’t an agree-upon name as yet. “3D pan & scan” or “multiplane effect” seem to be common. Adobe calls it “The 3D Picture Trick.”
I saw something like this a few months back. Is this what you’re talking about?
Mindfield, that’s really cool, but a different technique than OP was asking about. In the video you linked to they aren’t separating the image into planes and then giving perspective by moving the planes relative to each other. Mostly it seems they are distorting the image taking into account the horizon, background and camera perspective, but I’m sure it’s more complicated than that.
Please someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I think my example, while not great, is the effect being discussed. I haven’t seen The Kid Stays in the Picture, so I’m guessing a little that they use it the same as I’ve seen around.
I think garygnu nailed the common terms for this technique. Using them to search brought up a lot of hits about it, including this one, which answers the OP’s request for a tutorial and software that facilitates the effect nicely.