Should I use a special color profile in Photoshop for Second Life ?

[Laurent Bechir]

Hello,

I've noticed that textures are dull on Second Life compared to what I get in Second Life. I've seen it today with a gold texture which looked much brighter in Photoshop than in Second Life. I've seen in a tutorial that sometimes one has to change in Photoshop the color profile of textures donwloaded from internet to get the same result than the one seen in the browser, so I wonder if it is the same for Second Life, meaning that I should change the color profile of my texture before saving it for upload to Second Life ? If yes, which profile should I use ?

 

Thank you

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

i'd suggest using sRGB IEC61966-2.1  / u.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2

All color management Profiles set to Preserve Embedded. And Engine to Adobe (ACE)

This is one of the most comman standards.

But: in addition always keep in mind: SL is a 3D software and thus has an internal rendering engine. Images are applied as Diffuse (color) channels within the material and are influenced by the interal shaders and material properties and scenic lights, shadows, ambient occlusion etc.

Thus it will never look 100% the same as when being rendered just insides a browser or image editor etc.

 That's why you mostly should create textures while checking them with testuploads into SL to see if some coloring needs to be stronger or a shadow darker or more soft etc.., to achieve the visual outcome you have been looking for.

Another thing to make sure when uploading images to SL is to choose a correct format. I.e. PNG for lossless compression. Or create a JPG with the right settings of compression and quality. And convert / resize them already in your image editor to maximal 1024x1024 (everything else will be scaled down, and you have no control over visual problems appearing due to this conversion) by using your prefered scaling method. (bicubic, bilinear and so on)
Otherwise the images will show from little to many artefacts when being compressed and uploaded. Which also can result in fading colors or ugly spots.
And always make sure the images have been created in RGB mode and not CMYK, whilst the latter is printing standard based on how printers operate they will give wrong color results when being used for other purposes.

[Chosen Few]

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Codewarrior Congrejo wrote:.

Another thing to make sure when uploading images to SL is to choose a correct format. I.e. PNG for lossless compression. Or create a JPG with the right settings of compression and quality.

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Code, usually I agree with most all of your comments, but I have to disagree on this.  JPG is almost never a good option for texturing.  It's lossy, low quality.  It's a relic from 25+ years ago, when storage space was so limited, a single uncompressed image could fill an entire hard drive.  Back then, quality had to take a back seat to practical file size considerations. 

Nowadays, however, with storage space being dirt cheap and practically unlimited, it's rarely justifiable to use lossy compression, for much of anything.  For texturing, there's no justification at all.  With the exception of people who sell stuff on the DAZ market (just because DAZ is inexplicably weird like that), I don't know a single texture artist who touches JPG with a 10-foot pole, myself included.

With SL in particular, the quality loss problems from JPG get compounded.  Internally, SL uses a lossy* implementation of JPEG2000 for textures.  So, when you start with a lossy JPG image to begin with, and then it gets converted to a lossy JPEG2000, you end up losing quality not just once, but twice. The compounded artifacts can be noticeable.  When you start with a lossless image, however, the one-time loss that occurs upon upload is relatively negligible, much harder to notice. 

All the other formats SL can import (TGA, PNG, and BMP) are lossless.  JPG is the only one that isn't.  With 75% of your options being of good quality, you kind of have to go out of your way to use the one option that is not.

Further, because SL converts everything to JPEG2000 at the moment of upload, there's no need to be concerned with file size at all.  All other things being equal, no matter what kind of file you start with, you end up with the same sized JPEG2000 file when it's uploaded.

Add all that up, and the scales are tipped against JPG, 100%.  The basket of reasons not to use it is filled to the brim, while the basket on the other side is completely empty.

 

TGA is the most common industry standard format for texturing, and it's what I recommend all SL texture artists use.  PNG is also popular, but it can be somewhat problematic for SL.  Since PNG supports multiple types of transparency, SL sometimes has trouble determining proper bit depth when converting it to JPEG2000. It's not uncommon with PNG to accidentally end up with a 32-bit texture where a 24-bit one was the intent. With TGA, that simply can't happen.  Either you put an alpha channel in the thing on purpose, or you didn't. There's virtually no possibility of error.

 

Where JPG does dominate is on the Web, obviously. Web pages are one of the last environments where file size is still more important than quality.  JPG is also common with cell phone cameras, and other cheap digital cameras, which don't have much storage space in them, and are not typically built with the ability to write other formats.  None of that has anything to do with texturing, though, of course.

 

 

* SL's "lossless upload" option is meant for sculpt maps, and is only applicable to very small images. For medium and large images, the setting is ignored, and the upload is always lossy.