Real Life Photo or Virtual Image? Tiago's Tutorial To Make It Hard to Tell

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

The pictures by Flickr artist Tiago that I featured last week, especially the one above, sparked some discussion of whether they were taken in Second Life. or in real life. Can you guess?

Click below to find out -- and find out how Tiago creates images like this:

I sent Tiago a note and she confirmed her pictures were taken in SL. She explained that she shot the picture above* in Firestorm and then worked on it in GIMP. 

I asked if she would be willing to explain some of her process and she agreed. As an example, she knocked this picture out below in just a few hours: 

Here’s her step-by-step process to creating it:

This is the raw photo taken in Firestorm. She opened it in GIMP. She worked on this image to improve the details of the eyes and mouth.

She made a new layer in grayscale.

She then desaturated the image in shades.

Her next step was adjusting, she explains, “the layers by the corresponding modes, each to its own mode of transparency with the others.This is the most important point of the work, finding the right balance of settings. This allows for example to obtain a skin texture, to magnify the defects or to eliminate them… See the detail of the modes of each layer on the image [above].”

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She added color adjustment layers in orange and blue (above) in her process of finding the right balance. Then she worked on the background so that it takes less importance on the image, blurring its sharp lines, for example. 

She then adjusts the tone balance for the final rendering and does some aesthetic retouching around the facial features. 

Because we communicated in Google Translate with a little help from a friend to send my request, I will add her original French instructions so non-English readers can translate into their own language and not go through two reductions in precision: 

1. Récupérer l'image originale dans GIMP.
2. Améliorer le rendu graphique des yeux, de la bouche :  + grands ou + petit etc…
1. c'est cette image qui va servir de base pour les actions 3 et 4.
3. Convertir l'image du (2) en gris. 
4. Désaturer l'image du (2) en tons.
5. Ajuster les calques par les modes correspondants, chacun à son propre mode de transparence avec les autres.
1. C'est là le point le plus important du travail, trouver le juste équilibre des réglages. 
2. Cela permet par exemple d'obtenir un grain de peau, de grossir les défauts ou de les éliminer… Voir le détail des modes de chaque calque sur l'image TDB.jpg
6. Uniformiser le fond pour qu'il prenne moins d'importance sur l'image, là on utilise des outils particuliers.
7. Ajuster la balance des tons (très important) pour le rendu final des blancs, des noirs etc..
8. Retouches esthétiques, cheveux, yeux, bouche …
9. Et voilà

This picture does not look quite so real life as the one that sparked such controversy so I doubt it will settle matters. For me, she told me it was shot in Second Life and I will take her word for it. As to the rest, I am with those who said what does it matter, it is art. Her stream is an outstanding and thought-provoking collection of pictures and I wish I had featured a different picture so people would focus on that instead of what, to me, is really beside the point. 

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Update, 3:15PM: We asked Tiago for the original screen capture or to recreate one and will post that if she replies.