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Friday, January 13, 2012

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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. ;)

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