Vector Overlay for Stereogram

Stereogram Generator, the software Gene Levine and I use to assemble our stereograms can create hidden image stereograms and Mapped Image Stereograms. I often combine both as I showed in a previous post.

Adding an outline to the hidden image, using the Mapped Image Stereogram option—most often text, can help define the shape of the hidden image. And this can be either very very subtle or not subtle at all.

For our eyeTricks Facebook page cover I used a combination of HIS and MIS.

The outlines generated by the software however are not always as clean as I would like them to be. So I have found that by recreating the outlines using Xara's vector drawing tools (in this case the Shape Tool) I can produce a cleaner version of the outlines. I just use the output from the program as a template to draw from.

The first example was generated by the software and has a lot of unnecessary lines and artifacts on the left side.

Creating my own vector line shapes produces a much cleaner version, shown in the last image.

If you look at all the images first, then go back and forth between the last two, you can see the difference.