Getting started with SL photography?

[AveryGriffin]

Are there any tips someone could pass on to help me out? I'm new to photos on SL though I do know my way around photoshop!

How do I get a nice clean edge to the avatars? My graphics defaulted down a little low but even when I bump them up, the avatars still have that 'staircase jagged' effect going on and that would be a pain to get rid of manually, so I'm sure there's a better way.

Is there a way to lock the camera in place so I can fidget with my avatar and then go back to an angle I had liked earlier?

How do people get the expressions?

Annnd~ what sort of thing do people like? Just simple shadowing & recoloring on their avatar, or like, full blown background and changing their shape a little with liquefy and drawing in details, etc? Or is that dependent on the customer?

[AveryGriffin]

Are there any tips someone could pass on to help me out? I'm new to photos on SL though I do know my way around photoshop!

How do I get a nice clean edge to the avatars? My graphics defaulted down a little low but even when I bump them up, the avatars still have that 'staircase jagged' effect going on and that would be a pain to get rid of manually, so I'm sure there's a better way.

Is there a way to lock the camera in place so I can fidget with my avatar and then go back to an angle I had liked earlier?

How do people get the expressions?

Annnd~ what sort of thing do people like? Just simple shadowing & recoloring on their avatar, or like, full blown background and changing their shape a little with liquefy and drawing in details, etc? Or is that dependent on the customer?

[Tamara Artis]

Heya! For start I would recommend you to consult Google and Youtube, there are hundreds tutorials for every little thing you can imagine, just type SL photo editing, or snapshots tutorials. 

Most important thing is to take huge snapshots, as big as you can, so in the snapshots window chose custom size and bump it up, but keep the constrain proportions checked. Put your graphics as high as you can but remember, if you are taking a snapshot in the studio in front of some screen your draw distance, terrain and sky quality can stay lowest possible. Put on antialiasing (graphics-hardware) to bigger value, also the quality of your shadows can be set to bigger. 

As for locking the camera I have no idea, I've seen people write about it but never paid attention, I use Alt+mouse click and just find some nice angle.

For expressions you have free hud on the marketplace - https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/AnyPose-Expression/2613652 , I use the stand because you get the expression hud + different abilities for puppeting the avatar (you can change any pose and create your own).

Aaand what people like depends of what kind of people you are shooting. I would advise you to do what YOU like and sooner or later people that like same will find you. Just make sure you advertise yourself.

Good luck! 

[AveryGriffin]

Oh gosh thank you soooo much!!

I was getting sick of the jagged lines aack

That expression thing is my fav and I'm so happy you linked that c:

Okay so I tried to do this with a greenscreen bg since well it seemed to make sense for cutting out avis (I didn't feel like using the pen tool /lazy) and um the whispy parts of my hair still showed up green no matter what I did after I got rid of the bg >-<

SO since that was a pain I just ignored it and kinda, fooled around with shading and tossed some silly bg in for kicks. Then I had to come back to that hair. I got the green a little less noticible and eventually just tossed the whole pic into SAI so I could draw in the hair over it omg

Is there a way to like, not have that issue (whitescreen instead??) so I don't have to tear up my pic and eventually just draw over it anyway?

also cropped raw &  'finished' pic for ref~~

[Tamara Artis]

Ok so first, that photo came out great! Do you have Flickr or any other site where you can upload more photos? I am curious to see more:)

Then green screen, many people use it but honestly I hate it lol, I use white or grey, depending of what colors are on the avi. Think of it like this; if you use grey screen and have any leftovers they will blend into any kind of the bg you decide to use later far better than green, and same with the white.

If you're interested in learning and making more photos I can show you quick and easy way how to cut out hair and leave hair strands untouched, something like this (bg was grey but came out blue bc of the windlight):

Since you have no problems with painting in parts I would advise you to continue with it and use it more! If you plan to make photos for other people they will value your work 5 times more if you are able to draw.

Now I want to see more photos from you please

[Coby Foden]

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AveryGriffin wrote:

 

Okay so I tried to do this with a greenscreen bg since well it seemed to make sense for cutting out avis (I didn't feel like using the pen tool /lazy) and um the whispy parts of my hair still showed up green no matter what I did after I got rid of the bg >-<

Is there a way to like, not have that issue (whitescreen instead??) so I don't have to tear up my pic and eventually just draw over it anyway?

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There is an excellent plugin for Photoshop for extracting avatar from solid colour background:

Easy Green Screen Plugin

There is free version and non-free version. The free version extracts only against green background. But it does an excellent job. I have done some experiments and there is no green left even in whispy hair. It's worth to watch the video in the page I linked above to see how to do the extracting well without any greens left. Thi plugin is easy to use and super fast.

Here is one example I made:

 

• Left:  Original snapshot

• Middle:  Avatar extracted

• Right:  New background added

 

 

I'm sure Tamara will instruct how to extract avatar from random backgrounds.

[Madelaine McMasters]

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AveryGriffin wrote:

Are there any tips someone could pass on to help me out? I'm new to photos on SL though I do know my way around photoshop!

How do I get a nice clean edge to the avatars? My graphics defaulted down a little low but even when I bump them up, the avatars still have that 'staircase jagged' effect going on and that would be a pain to get rid of manually, so I'm sure there's a better way.

Is there a way to lock the camera in place so I can fidget with my avatar and then go back to an angle I had liked earlier?

How do people get the expressions?

Annnd~ what sort of thing do people like? Just simple shadowing & recoloring on their avatar, or like, full blown background and changing their shape a little with liquefy and drawing in details, etc? Or is that dependent on the customer?

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I take the scissors to wispy images all the time, using Photoshop's "Refine Edge" tool.

If you know what background scene you want to overlay your object on, you can make life easier by selecting a green-screen color to match the background (if possible). This minimizes the visibility of any bleed. But that's often not possible, you may want to use the same cutout on many different backgrounds. In that case, I generally pick a green-screen color that's across the color wheel from the dominant colors in the edge of my object, so that I get maximum contrast for the Refine Edge tool. For example, if I'm wearing dark green, I'd not pick green for the green-screen, I'd pick lavendar. If I'm wearing mint green, I'd use dark purple. That's easy to do in world using the texture picker.

Here's Adobe's tutorial...

http://help.adobe.com/en_US/photoshop/cs/using/WS2bacbdf8d487e582-37ff79af12b3b577ca2-8000.html

[AveryGriffin]

Oh gosh thank you all so much for the tips! I'm going to slowly use all of them soon!

@Tamara - I'm going to have to try that next time. Usually my issue seems to be I'll take a pic and not know the bg I want till way later But I'm going to give that a try and see if that helps~

@Coby - I'm totally DLing that plugin asap. It looks awesome. TY!

@Madelaine - I actually use that tool at my job! I do a lot of cutting out of folks for things and usually transplant them onto a premade bg and it helps to have their hair more natural looking. I tried doing that in the pic above, but the wisps would not cooperate!

-

I went on location this time to save from hair cut outs. Also because I wanted to play around with shadows and things and see what sl could do if I just stood still and didn't move, haha. (and also because I was dressed for the occasion~)

this is a combo of sl deciding shadows and me drawing in shadows - I grabbed multiple shadings (and no shading) in the same spot and just layered everything over and masked what I wanted and what I didn't want. Now that I look at it, it's a little dark :B

also the blur is my own add in because I tried to do the built in bg blur but it was crazy o-o