This week I’m going to be talking about using Photography
within Second Life. A lot of designers
don’t know quite how to represent their products properly to catch the eye of
that shopper who can only go off a photograph before taking the time to
teleport to your shop to purchase a demo.
The first thing to consider before taking that photograph of
the item you have worked so many hours creating is placement and lighting. If you’re a hair creator you don’t
necessarily need to worry about the bottom half of your avatar in the
photograph or what you would wear from the waist down. You know that you will want a pretty zoomed
in photograph with just the right lighting to show off those amazing hair
textures you’ve created to show realism in the hair. So you have the right outfit, accessories and
backdrop you are going to be using.
The next thing is to look at your settings within the Second
Life Preferences of your viewer. You
could just simply click the snapshot button and be done. However, you will get a plain shot of your
item and with thousands of other hairstyles out there for sale what will set
yours apart from the rest?
I’m going to walk you through the settings I would recommend
to get you that realistic shot that will give your item the most pop and grab
the attention of the buyers you are looking to gain. I use the Firestorm
release viewer 4.6.7, it is the most up to date viewer and allows for all the
new features that are currently available within Second Life.
Step 1
- At the top of your viewer click Avatar then Preferences
- Click on graphics tab and change performance to Ultra on the Slider
- On the left under shaders make sure all are clicked (view picture below for reference)
- Shadows click the drop down and choose Sun/Moon+Projectors
- Draw distance I recommend 224 however you can play with this setting to your liking (this controls the shadows of how close or far away they are)
- Refer to the reference picture to change any other settings that may be different on the graphics tab screen.
Ok now you have your settings all
set up and you’re ready to take that amazing photo. You have chosen the right
pose the right wind light settings which I will cover in another topic if you’re
not familiar and you click on the snapshot icon to capture your photo. Wait a minute though it just takes a generic
size and very plain quality photo. Well
there are few settings within the photo tab that need to be adjusted to get
that overall affect you’re looking for. First go to the top of your viewer and
click on the Advanced tab and choose High-res Snapshot. (Refer to photo for
reference) Once that is checked then look back down at your snapshot and adjust
your settings as follows.
- Click Disk tab (that means the photo will save to your computer)
- Change the dimensions tab by clicking the drop down and choosing custom
- Width 4500 Height 2500 (I like my photos to be extra-large so when I resize I don’t lose any definition.)
- Change from Jpeg format to PNG and image quality to very high 100
Once you have all of those settings set they should save for
any time after that you choose to take photos.
Now click on the refresh tab (looks like a little arrow going
counter-clockwise over the preview of your photo). Once you have saved this to
your computer you can then go into your any of your editing programs to crop,
highlight or use any filters you may like to make the image pop even more! I have included some reference photos of before and after
showing you how the photo looked before adjusting my settings to the after
affect so you can see just what an amazing job Second Life can do without having
to do much altering in Photoshop afterwards.
Also look at the outfit from the before and after and you can really see
how the adjustments have brought out the clothing. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and until
next time happy designing!
BEFORE AFTER
Helpful Links:
No comments:
Post a Comment