The Perception of Depth in Photographic Images

There is an abundance of literature in the domain of pictorial art that discusses two-dimensional cues to depth; however, this literature does not address how pictorial cues influence the perceived depth of real-world scenes rendered onto a photographic image. To this end, we conducted two studies to better understand the perception of depth in photographic prints. In Experiment 1, we asked a group of naïve observers to view a number of consumer photographs and judge the amount of depth in the main subject and the overall scene. In Experiment 2, naïve observers were asked to compare a number of consumerlike stereoscopic images (print and slide) to photographs and rate the comparative amount of depth per scene. The results of these studies indicate that there are specific photographic image attributes that drive the perception of depth in photographs.