A reader commented that she felt cheated because I edit the pics on my blog, that in reality the textures looked all wrong and not looking alive. I am actually glad she commented this because truth is… I do… sometimes, edit pics that are featured on my blog. Like yesterday when I bloggged the Mercy shoes from Orange Creations, but I think you’d have to be blind not to realise it is edited.
What I never edit though are my LOTD pictures, other than that I crop them and add a border. I simply lack the PS skills to edit all my pics (it would take WAY too much time, and suck the fun right out of me) and besides, I think that products featured should reflect the actual quality as much as possible.
So to illustrate how I work when I take pictures, here is… a picture:
Yes, it’s cropped, I added a border and.. omg.. letters!! 😀 Lets go through it, ok? NB: I take all my pictures running SL in the official LL 2.0 viewer on ultra settings.
A) in my studio, which isn’t more than a rounded white wall, with default mid day light settings. No other in world lights for funky effects.
B) in the same studio, but now with the WL settings provided by Caliah Lyon. You can see the massive difference, the textures in general looking way more vibrant
C) still the same studio with Caliah’s settings, but here I have added a 0.02 glow to the white wall behind me. The effect is that there seems to be a light shining through and the av’s edges get smoothed a wee bit.
C is how I take 99, 9% of my pics. So, yeah, that’s my secret. No editing, but making use of the in world tools that every resident has (provided they have a decent computer and can run more than basic shaders). It’s not my intention to make my readers feel cheated, ever. But I don’t think using in world tools for photography can ever be considered cheating. However. In the rare occasion that I will use an edited image, from now on, I will mention it.
[UPDATE 100531] since many have let me know how much they appreciate these little tricks, I figured, I’d add a little bit more about the technicalities of taking photo’s in world. Tips:
- Make sure that taking high resolution photos is enabled (open advanced menu -ctrl+alt+D- and check high res photos);
- Antialiasing is set on 8x (open preferences>graphics>hardware and set to 8x. I find 16x not working better for me, but maybe that depends on the system you have running, so play a little with that). Antialiasing wil make the image look smoother;
- Take your photos as a bitmap (JPEG and PNG will lessen the quality in my opinion)
- Take your photos as big as your system will support. For me, it’s ” safe” to take photos at 4000 x 4000. Anything higher will likely crash me in the process. This will leave you enough possibilities for cropping your image, and make it smaller so the image will look sharper.
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