Cajsa's Techniques: How The Friendly Otter Creates Her Amazing, Painting-Like, SL-Based Images

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Hamlet was particularly curious about the process for The Friendly Otter’s “The Crows Watch” that I featured recently. I thought it was likely mostly achieved in Second Life and he thought it was likely more post-processing. Experimenting in WindLight myself, it was fairly easy to get a black and white silhouette, but to get the kind of etched detail was another story. But there was more to it after all. 

The Friendly Otter shared her process with me. Her pictures were shot in Firestorm. First, she used Xanthe’s Hazy Daze WindLight, commenting that it does a good job of clearing the background with bright white light. Then she began editing in PhotoShop. She guessed that took about an hour or two. These are the steps:

1. Film Grain filter - max Highlight Area and max Intensity. This softens the background a little more and shows some more detail of the foreground
2. Black & White adjustment
3. Tilt-Shift Blur - just a low blur of 5px; angled it so it kept the bird bodies clear but blurred the house and some of the legs
4. Texture Overlay - set to Color Burn
5. Photocopy Texture Overlay - set to Lighter Color

Here’s a couple more by Otter, with her technique notes:

Here is “Two trees stand in a forest, one larger than the other and each with different colours.” For this, she used her own Windlight setting she created called Grey Ambient Mist. This took her a little longer, about two hours because she is not accustomed to working in color. 

1. Film Grain filter - max Highlight Area and max Intensity. This made everything around the larger tree nearly disappear
2. Lowest Brightness and Highest Contrast Showed green and orange colours along the slivers of grass
3. Accented Edges filter. This added a little "painted" feeling to the pic and a very high 
4. Edge Brightness added softness around edges
5. Texture overlay - set to Linear Light. This setting lightened the main tree and darkened the green and orange a little to feel more like a fire was emerging; the texture also had short white streaks in it that added to a possible "harsh environment" feeling.
6. Tree Bark Texture overlay - set to Lighten This was cropped just around the main tree

Another great one:

“Strangers” is an amazing image that suggests movement and the anonymity of a city. She used her own WindLight, Grey Ambient Mist. It took her between one and two hours, to “avoid an obvious horror/thriller piece.”

1. Film Grain filter - High Intensity but low Highlight Area so it just whitened the top of the image highlighting some of the people the woman in the middle was looking at
2. Vibrance adjustment - Set to lowest Saturation
3. Field Blur - set to 5px This is low enough that it's not too blurry but high enough that the other people look mysterious
4. Texture overlay - set to Divide  The scratches and rough elements of the texture bled into the parts surrounding the main woman
5. Photocopy Texture Overlay set to Overlay

Common elements of the editing process are using the Film Grain Filter and experimenting with blur, edges, and overlays. Now that people are selling WindLights on Marketplace, perhaps The Friendly Otter will follow suit. 

See all of Cajsa's Choices here. Follow Cajsa on Flickr, on Twitter or on her blog.