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raw inworld shots


DarkUnicorN
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I can think of at least two interpretations of your somewhat inespecific question:

  • Either you want to know just how to take pics in SL (and which professional SL photographers usually refer to as “raw”, in the sense that they haven”t still been processed in Photoshop, but are otherwise perfectly viewable)...
  • ... or, perhaps more probably due to the initial “.” dot, you mean what in RL digital photography is referred to as the “RAW format”: the digital information taken straight out of the sensor (save for the A/D conversion), still unprocessed by either the camera itself or your computer’s editing program, and which in that original form isn’t quite viewable, it has to be interpreted (processed) one way or the other to become a “normal” picture.

Assuming it’s the second, you can’t, at least not in any way that I know of. The viewer captures pretty much what you’re seeing (albeit, depending on your settings, at perhaps a higher resolution), but otherwise does it in a completely standarized, readily viewable format... either JPEG or PNG (I’m not sure if there’s also TGA and BMP, I wouldn’t use them). And while you can obviously process that in Photoshop to enhance it or alter it in any way you like, it’s not like the original is too “crude” to be even displayed, as RL photography’s .RAW is; nor is there any way in which such hypothetical .RAW could “store more information than the typical, in-camera JPEG does”, as its RL counterpart; it’s true that you’ll probably get slightly more quality out of saving the SL capture in PNG format, because it’s lossless whereas JPEG isn’t, but that’s as far as the comparison goes. The only way I can imagine for SL viewers to offer something akin to “RAW format” would be no doubt very useful for photographers, but I’m afraid way, way out of the question for Linden Lab to develop.

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to answer to u...about the 2nd option u wrote rl raw pics...no! i already know that i am RL PHOTOGRAPHER its my job....i am asking for second life...i have heard many IN WORD photographers tell about raw shots...but none explain !

Its because i know what  mean from RL and how to use a raw pic....perhaps i though there is something similar here in sl...( if u underastand my thinking) .......

so may i re-ask again, different way...when an in word photographer says he took a raw pic, what does mean?

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OK, by “raw shot” we just mean an unprocessed one, the original picture that the viewer stored in disk (or in SL inventory, or uploaded to Flickr / whatever, if you so choose), representing exactly what we were seeing in the viewer, no enhancements at all(*). We may fiddle a lot with the viewer adjustments (Windlight, graphics quality, effects, lights & shadows, DOF, etc.) to try and make the nicest possible “raw shot” right out of the viewer, but that original, straight-from-viewer image will still be the “raw shot” as long as we don’t retouch it. Whatever we do with it in Photoshop (liquify-smooth the polygonal curves, fix clothing glitches, enhance lighting, effects, etc.), that becomes the “processed” shot.

It may be best for you to visualize the difference; many, if not most SL photographers, often publish both versions, the “raw shot” and the “edited / processed” one, so that people may appreciate the editing work, and perhaps check how the thing actually looked like in-world (in case they want to, for example, buy the same skin or clothing or whatever is portrayed) before perhaps not so evident enhancements. A good place to see many examples is the blog of a famous SL photographer, Strawberry Singh, who often offers such “raw shot” for exactly that purpose, like here. In her case, as you’ll see, the processed pic usually only differs in the smoothing of SL-specific body angles and some other minor enhancements; other photographers go much further and the raw shot is barely a distant beginning when compared with the final pic.

 

And no, I’m afraid there’s nothing remotely similar to RL’s “RAW format’ in Second Life; as I said, it’d be mighty useful, perhaps in even more ways than its RL counterpart, depending how it was implemented; but I seriously doubt it will ever be. There’s for sure a whole load of improvements Linden Lab could do in the area of SL photography, but as usual, they can only do so much :smileyvery-happy:

 

 

(*) Except, as I said, for choosing a higher resolution than our screen’s... and, very recently, the added ability some viewers have of applying some relatively basic filters to the picture, such as sepia, B/W, vignetting, etc.; I’m not sure yet whether that will still be called “raw shot” in that it wasn’t processed outside of the viewer’s own capabilities, or maybe “raw shot with in-viewer filter X”. Dunno.

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btw, may I ask what specific feature of RAW format were you interested in replicating in SL? Color balance correction, demosaicing, chromatic aberration / lens correction, HDR / tonemapping / highlights & shadows recovery... or just overall maximum possible image quality?

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To take  the equivalent of RAW shots you'd have to take numerous shots under different lighting conditions. Then post process them in photoshop. In photography we call that multiple exposure bracketing.

Take screenshots with PRINT SCREEN to avoid compression into JPG using the screenshot tool.

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To avoid lossy compression I'd rather suggest using the viewer's own snapshot function, but choosing PNG as the saved image format: it's lossless, so no image quality degradation occurs; it allows for far higher resolution (which, indirectly, also benefits quality) than possible with nearly any existing monitor and associated hardware; and it completely bypasses the viewer's interface and worn HUDs without having to deactivate all of it and then relogging in full-screen to avoid the title bar as well.

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