Trick of the Light

[Spinell]

I am a newbie when it comes to SL photography. Or RL photography for that matter. XD

So, please be patient when I ask something that may be way over my head. Ok, here goes:

I want to know how to adjust lighting and shadows for SL photography to get a short of "airy" feel. I don't know how to describe it, it's a lighting technique I see all the time in good SL photography and it makes the photo realistic, pop out and not look just completely flat (like my pics XD).

Here is an example I just found: http://yeriak.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/glam-dreams_002.png

See the lighting? How it casts the shadows on the sofa, etc?

I have no idea how they do that or if it's made inside SL or if it's a photoshop thing. Could someone give me a starting point? I'm honestly very curious how they manipulate light for SL photography.

[Ren Toxx]

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Spinell wrote: [...] 

to get a short of "airy" feel [...] it makes the photo realistic, pop out and not look just completely flat [...] 

See the lighting? How it casts the shadows on the sofa, etc? [...]

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To be honest I'm not sure what you mean, you seem to be describing different things or effects. If what you want is the scene's objects and objects to cast actual shadows, that's achieved by activating ALM (“Advanced Lighting Model”) in the graphics section of the viewer's preferences, and make sure below that all points of light, or at least sun & moon, are also active (otherwise you'd be using the lighting model, but telling the viewer to ignore any actual light sources, so you'd get no shadows); and the shadows will be rendered a bit more realistically if you also activate “Ambient Occlusion”, a different setting.

If the issue is having some soft halos of light, kind of like a dreamy effect, the first thing that comes to mind is glow, which can render that effect in-world, and can be played with (there are several debug settings for it), though of course the objects have to have some glow set in them.

Personally, though, and unless it's easily achievable with windlight and glow adjustments (and providing the scene does have glowing objects), I prefer to do it in post-processing, where I have more precise control of it and less framerate issues. Several advanced image editors such as Photoshop or Gimp will let you duplicate the layer, blur the hell out of the duplicate one, and then lower its opacity to the point where the details of the original are easily distinguishable, while retaining the halo effect; you may even play with layer blending modes, as well as opacities, blur radius and masks, to shape it better. Many decent image editors will probably have all this available as a ready-made image filter, either in-built or third-party.

 

And yet a different thing would be, if you want to make the picture “pop out, less flat”... at least to me, that sounds more like increasing local contrast... either softly, or in a heavy Dragan-like effect. That can be done, too, of course... there's not much you can do about it in the viewer, some have in-built “HDR functionality” but it seems more focused on global tone mapping than local contrast, and for some scenes, it can ctually make the picture more “flat”. For this need, too, post-processing is a far more controllable option, again with many in-built methods or filters... just be aware that this kind of effect would be, in fact, pretty much the opposite of the dreamy / glowy / soft blur thing I described earlier.

[Bree Giffen]

To get that particular lighting effect, apart from turning on all your windlight settings as Ren mentioned (and having a video card that can actually display those settings), is to edit the atmosphere settings. You go to the world menu->environment editor->sky presets->new preset. There is an atmosphere tab with stuff like blue horizon and blue desnsity (although you can use colors other than blue) and haze horizon and haze density. There are also a few other sliders on the right. If you try adjusting the settings you should see various hazy and glow type effects.

I have to say again that you do need a good graphics card in your computer that can actually display the windlight settings and high graphics preferences.

[Spinell]

Thank you so much for all your tips. They really helped! I made up a new environment for me with some lovely lighting and now SL even looks much better!

As for photos, the light really makes things pop. I found the presets section which helped a lot! I love all the midday setting as well as the costal afternoon.

Here's a new picture I just took:

 

It looks so much better than what I used to take!!

[Chic Aeon]

Just another tip about Windlight. If you are using a third party viewer (not the default Linden viewer) you have a HUGE number of presets added. Some of them are even mine LOL (the ones staring with Places).

If you love Coastal Afternoon, I am guessing you are on the Linden Viewer .

I suspect that in that long list there are a few that come very close to the photo you referenced. If you don't want to install a third party viewer (many more lighting options in Firestorm including a very nice SKY panel) you can download other people's Windlight settings and add them to the viewer. You will have to figure out where they are saved on your machine. Doing a search of your computer for one of the settings you have (it is an xml file) will let you find the directory.

 

Here is a page I made three years ago on Windlight. It was also one of my first machinima and is embarrassingly bad, but the info is fairly relevant still.

 

http://chicatphilsplace.blogspot.com/2009/09/windlight-settings.html

[Bree Giffen]

Looks great! Very vivid colors! The windlight settings are great for photography.

 

You can add more lighting effects with prim light sources and prim projector lighting.

[Jackson Redstar]

alot of it is balancing the sun intensity to the ambient itensity. if the sun is nearly white, and ambient is nearly black, you will get a very contrasty look. if the sun is black or nearly black and ambient is was up, you will get almost no shadows. Also, try not having the sun at noon when shootig people. ad when shooting outdoors, in sunlight, turn off local lites and attached lites. Sometimes those facelights can destroy a shot

 

a simple start is get Strawberry Signh's windlight presets from her blog. I also have some on mine as well