Apparatuses and methods are presented that use a direct synthesis approach using layers in order to directly generate a virtual view from a pair of images. In one embodiment, a range space is discretized into a plurality of layers. For each layer, the first input image and the second input image are warped to the layer. A matching score is then determined for each pixel in the new view based on the warped input images. For each pixel in the virtual view, a best layer is determined. After the best layer has been determined, the color of the pixel in that layer is used for that pixel in the generated view.