The Preparation of Stereoscopic 3D Illustrations of Confocal Data Sets for Publications and Slides

In this chapter we describe a simple method to prepare 3D illustrations from stereo-pairs of images from confocal sections. Methods for preparing both stereo slides and stereo images for publication using Microsoft’s PowerPoint� 97 and CorelDraw� 8 are described. The parallel and cross-eyed viewing methods are also described and used to prepare the 3D illustrations. The procedure assumes previous preparation of stereo-pairs from the confocal data sets. Therefore, stereoscopy theory and methods of preparation of stereo-images are not described in this chapter but can be found in the operating manuals for the confocal microscopes and in more detail in (1 –4 ).