Why are my photos and my avatar in my photos always blurry?

[Sally Hurricane]

I suppose these are two separate things but if possible, I'd like a few tips for both.

Firstly, why is my avatar always blurry when I'm trying to take a photo, I'd like it to be crystal clear! This just further complicates the blurred shot further.

Secondly, and I suppose this is to do with my laptop, but ALL of my photos captured on SL are blurry, they are absolutely awful!

Here is an example:

 

If I could have any tips, please post them! Maybe there's a way I can boost my actual laptop's graphics?

[Madelaine McMasters]

Hi Sally,

Most laptops can't support SL's highest graphics settings for very long before overheating, but you might be able to turn them on briefly. So, as Alwin suggests, try setting your graphics on High or Ultra. If you don't get useable frame rates (everything seems choppy) but things look better, keep the setting long enough to take your snapshot, then revert back to your usual setting. Many of us temporarily turn on all the graphics bells and whistles for snapshots, then go back to living with more modest settings.

I do have some other recommendations...

First, to reduce the jaggies on the edges between contrasty objects (like your hair and the background), turn on Antialiasing. You'll find that in the Preferences->Graphics->Hardware. I see more improvement between none and 2x than between 2x and anything higher, so I generally run at 2x.

Next, click on the Snapshot toolbar button to bring up the Snapshot window. Click on "Save to Disk". There's a drop-down button right under the "Disk" label that allows you to select image sizes. It's probably set to the default of "Current Window". That matches the size of your viewer's window. You can make the image capture window much, much larger. Select from any of the drop-down options, or set it to "Custom" and enter the image dimensions you want.

If you type values into the "Width x Height" boxes (or press the up/down arrows) at any time, the drop-down will automatically switch to Custom from whatever it was. You can create images up to 6014x6014 pixels (if that doesn't stall or crash the viewer!). Below the width x height boxes, you'll see another dropdown for image format. Select JPEG, particularly if you've selected a very large image size. That will reduce the resulting image file size. A 6014x6014 PNG image would be around 145MB, whereas a JPEG might be just a few MB, depending on image complexity.

There's a "Quality" slider for the JPEG compression. I get good results with the default setting of "75" but you can certainly set it higher or lower if you wish. Once you've saved the image, you can pull it into any graphics program and resize it as you wish. The added detail you obtain by making a large initial image will result in better looking smaller images than you're currently getting by making small images directly in SL.

Happy Shooting!