A display hologram made by internationally acclaimed artist Rudie Berkhout produces the profile of a mannequin head. The illumination consists of a white light stripe with an embedded HeNe stripe. Note how the 632.8 nm laser stripe is spectrographically separated in the resulting profile. It forms a reference for wave length that is useful in the analysis of the color strip. In that strip, distance is encoded as color, and the entire profile can be decoded from a single line where depth is proportional to red shift. The HeNe wave length also can be used by itself to extract a 2D profile, shown on the right.

With Diffraction Range Finding 3-D data is encoded as spatial shift in monochromatic illumination or as color frequency shift in full spectral incoherent white light.