Iris' 5 Point Checklist for Flawless, Foolproof, & Photoshop-Free Second Life Snapshots

Iris Ophelia's ongoing review of virtual world and MMO fashion

The Secondlife.com homepage image (pictured on the right) gave me a sharp case of déjà vu recently. About one month ago I wrote about how LL could improve their Marketplace graphics substantially with a few visual changes-- most of them simple techniques for taking a flattering snapshot that can make the most of SL's graphic capabilities... things that LL is definitely (still) not doing.

I know plenty of people believe that a snapshot from SL can't even look any better than these ads without extensive Photoshopping, but that just is not the case anymore. Have you seen Sl these days? It's pretty gorgeous if you know where to look.

Believe it or not, you can get amazing shots of your avatar and your environment straight from the client (like the picture at the top of this post), and it's not as hard as you might think...

1. Check your Settings

This is vital in particular if you have a slightly older computer. I'm not going to get too deep into this subject (Strawberry Singh already has), but for roaming around SL you may want to keep your graphics on a low to medium setting, while for photography you've got to crank it to 11 even if you aren't using shadows or depth of field. Check your snapshot settings while you're at it, and make sure your quality slider is maxed and your resolution is reasonably high. You don't need a snapshot that's 6000 pixels wide, but I generally get the best results with a snapshot that's at the very least over 1000. Shadows and DoF can wreak havoc with Anti-Aliasing and High-Res graphics settings, so taking a large picture allows you to reduce it for a crisper looking final product. Doing all of this should give you crisp edges, smooth prims, and more detailed textures.

2. Check your Sun

Let's take a closer look at that main page vampire. The SL avatar is a bit of a disaster, and bad lighting highlights this. There are unnatural dips and dents in the avatar that can spoil any snapshot. In our main page vampiress you can see this perfectly demonstrated with the cleavage that climbs right up to her clavicle, as well as the pinched areas on either side of her nose. If you aren't set on using particularly artistic lighting, you should try to position the sun directly infront of your face-- or, if you're not comfortable editing environment settings in your viewer of choice, position yourself facing the sun. Normally an evening setting will get the sun dead in front of you, and you can brighten or darken the sky as needed. If you're getting intereference from lamps or nearby facelights, don't forget that you can also turn of Local Lights in Preferences for more even lighting.

3. Check your Pose

Another big problem with our Linden vamp is that her torso looks unnervingly contorted and broken. When you're taking a snapshot, you need to be very aware of your avatar's pose and, more importantly, if it's breaking the illusion of a healthy human body somehow. Jagged areas, abnormal bends or creases, weird stretched areas of the print on your outfit... Look over every inch of your avatar for these issues. You can fix some of these issues by changing your camera angle, cropping the image differently, or simply changing poses.

4. Check your Clothes

Check and double check that everything is properly fitted, and resting as naturally as possible against your avatar. Prints on fabrics may highlight an unflattering pose, but don't forget about your prims as well. If your head is on an angle or your avatar is bending, for example, you may have to adjust the prims of your accessories or clothing to keep them from clipping or sinking awkwardly.

5. Rebake!

I was a little shocked when I noticed the difference that rebaking right before taking a snapshot can make, especially in terms of how crisp the features on skin and clothing textures look. This is so easy to do right before you finally take your snapshot, it might blow you away too. Where this feature is depends on your individual viewer, but for me it's at the top of my Advanced menu.

Those are my most crucial snapshotting steps, but what about yours? Have I overlooked your holy grail of SL photography? Tell me below!

Iris Ophelia (Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Pussycat Catnap]

While I think they're right to use vampires given the SL demographics (its that or the pron/BDSM crowd...), LLs needs to L2P regarding the tools in its own viewer... :)

For the new you contest, I turned out a straight snapshot like this:
http://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/changes-over-the-year-in-my-look/

The left side image is 'what people expect', but even its better than LLs does. The right side image is just a minor few tweaks to the graphic settings...

And I need to edit my blog there to say what I did, because I've discovered people think its from having an amazing machine, when it isn't.

I use:
Light/sun to 'Incongruent Truths' preset. Then adjust the sun to a time of day showing the mood you want. This preset brings out great color saturation as well as highlights and shadows.

Turn on shadows, ambient occlusion, and depth of field. Set anti-alias to 8x (at least I do).

Use a still pose. Not your AO animations. A still pose will let you work with it. There -IS- a freeze frame option in the snapshots, but the still poses are still just going to help you mentally frame your scene better...

Don't have untextured props in the background like I did... :)

Rez 3 spheres, and make them lights. I forget the options on SL lights... but this is someting I've been doing since the Poser days. Even if you can't set a directional light, three different colored lights around your scene will really make it pop. I did -NOT- do that in my blog's screenshot, but will do it soon and show an update. My screenshot just has one light, which was used to bring out a highlight along my avatar.

You put each light at a different spot, with different color, strength, etc...

Take snapshot, and lord it over your friends. :)

[kesseret]

Cadence Aldrich does photoshop free pictures all the time, along with Elle Couerblanc. Those are just 2 I know offhand and I wish Linden Lab would at least contact them or someone to do pictures and graphics. It would make SL look MUCH more appealing to the average person.

[Deoridhe Quandry]

My entire blog and almost all of my flickr stream is photoshop-free pictures, and I don't exactly have a leading edge computer. It's surprisingly easy once you get used to it.

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

In my case, it's GIMP-free :). I have a VERY few times done a bit of blurring to obscure the prim breast-torso join, and once for a image for a group I used edge detection, but aside from that, the only thing I do to my photos with GIMP is crop.

[Orca Flotta]

PS and Gimp are way overkill for just prettying up you snapshots. I use a french software, PhotoFiltre, which is free in basic version. It's easy to use, gives you a lot of cool tools to play with and generally gives you perfect results for almost every need. The free version doesn't do layers tho, but I never need that.

Some croppig, added highlights here and there, more shadows, cartoonify, black and white, sepia, frames, it's all I need.

A good photo has to be a good photo right the moment when you take it. It's a good photo even without postproduction values added. And less is more ;)

[Melissa Yeuxdoux]

Alas, JIRA issue SH-2378 is still open, and makes taking photos larger than the window the client is displaying in. Have you noticed the problems associated with this issue, Iris?

[Ann / Vint]

Additionally, ctrl+0 to get that fashion style 120mm lens is your friend. ;)