How To Sharpen A Second Life Photo With The High Pass Filter In Gimp

[AdminGirl]

13 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

That's fine, everyone has his own opinion, otherwise we'd be bland and boring.

There is no such thing as "too straining on my comp". The PC is no living organism that "tires" out or dies because of some overusage. That's what they were made for, unless you overclock them and actually physically "burn" them you're not hurting your hardware by doing something "too straining", it will simply be slower at doing the thing while doing the thing.

Also, it seems like most people think that doing nice pictures goes smoothly for better hardware or "high end hardware", which i can tell you. It doesn't. At all. Some pictures i'm working on, i get 3-4 FPS before taking the snapshot. Depending on the area and settings it can go even lower and i can guarantee you that the super duper hyper high end gaming PC with quadrillion gigabytes of RAM and 4 GPU's is not doing any better, if you pull those settings up with the aim to make something truly nice looking, you'll be looking at a power point presentation regardless of your hardware, that's simply a limitation of SL and the settings, some are simply resource eaters (like raytracing) and there are no cheap shots there. A low framerate should not stop you from trying to get the best out of your image. Do not let crashes deter you, use them to learn the ropes. We've all been through this. trust me, i have crashed the Viewer so many times already blowing the settings (and resolution) completely out of proportion simply to see where my hardware gives up so i know in which area i can work in.

Thanks for your explanation. I agree with you on what should happen in terms of PC. My PC tends to crash rather than viewer crashing. I've read others experiencing the same but I think it's to do with problems on my end. Thanks for the encouragement to learn though because it's true, my crashes have deterred me. But when I get my PC issues sorted I will definitely jump into it.

[Lusus Saule]

2 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Now tell me. One. More. Time. Black Dragon needs a high end PC.

Sorry to tell you that Black Dragon does use up a lot of PC resources. As I have said its brilliant for taking SL pics, but in my experience the settings have to be  high to do this, and thats when its likely to crash a PC with moderate specs. I'm not criticising your viewer, just stating facts. My PC has an i5 processor, 12GB RAM and an  Nividia 760 card. I use this because I can't presently afford to get a better PC. If I open Black Dragon and tweak settings to take decent photos the frame rate will go down to single figures and the viewer will eventually crash. If I don't tweak the settings in order to get good pics, then there's no point in using the viewer.

Reading through your response to Admin Girl, I have edited this to add that Black Dragon will crash a lot sooner than for example Firestorm.

Sadly I have to tell you that I have no intention of stopping my tutorials, mainly because I think you are wrong. It seems according to your view unless someone follows your way of doing things they are wrong and their images will therefore be poor. Thats not they way things work I'm afraid. All you can expect of anyone is for them to work with what they have, try to arm themselves with as many tools as possible, and use them mindfully. As I have said before, the only thing that matters is the final image.

I also won't stop writing tutorials because I try to look between the cracks and share information that others don't. For example, I was pretty much the first person to develop a reliable way to create 3D images from SL pics, and I also developed a way to focus/blur an image (before depth maps could be created in viewers).  I also worked on a reliable way for people to create 3D images on Facebook.  As well as this, I have  created wallpaper tutorials, and shown how to create seamless, scrolling panoramas from SL images that can be viewed on the desktop and/or used as screensavers.

I have also shown how using 360 degree panoramic images created in SL can be used to present a tour of a location, and embedded if needed on a website.

https://poly.google.com/view/ajrGRiKpRdt

This came in useful when someone I knew in SL passed away and I could create a record of their land before LL cleared it. Using the same tools I created this a few Halloweens ago, (view fullscreen):

https://momento360.com/#ud/64956315192445f5bad609d8d9f63257

I've also created a series of tutorials covering different software for people who want to DJ in SL, some tutorials on using vector graphics, and I'll soon be creating tutorials on machinima and video editing software.

None of this may be hugely important, but my aim is to demonstrate there are different ways to look at and do things, which in turn I hope encourages people to experiment a little. Second Life offers all sorts of possibilities and not everyone needs to follow well trodden paths.

Having said all of that, this is all a side interest because my real focus is creating art both inside and  outside of SL.

 

Edited September 12, 2020 by Lusus Saule
fix typos

[Lusus Saule]

Klytyna 🙈🙉🙊

[NiranV Dean]

4 hours ago, Lusus Saule said:

Sorry to tell you that Black Dragon does use up a lot of PC resources. As I have said its brilliant for taking SL pics, but in my experience the settings have to be  high to do this, and thats when its likely to crash a PC with moderate specs. I'm not criticising your viewer, just stating facts. My PC has an i5 processor, 12GB RAM and an  Nividia 760 card. I use this because I can't presently afford to get a better PC. If I open Black Dragon and tweak settings to take decent photos the frame rate will go down to single figures and the viewer will eventually crash. If I don't tweak the settings in order to get good pics, then there's no point in using the viewer.

Reading through your response to Admin Girl, I have edited this to add that Black Dragon will crash a lot sooner than for example Firestorm.

Whether the Viewer crashes sooner is solely dependent on your settings compared to your hardware, not the hardware alone.

Apart from a crash (that i just fixed) when swapping between inventory water presets and the illusive right-click crash with pie menus enabled that i have been trying to catch for years. There are no known crashes currently that are not your own fault. The Viewer (all Viewers actually) have one very well known setting that can outright crash you (actually it crashes your graphics drivers (actually actually it doesn't, it drops its responsiveness so much that more than the default 3 seconds safe time passes between "activity pings", in other words the driver stays unresponsive for longer than 3 seconds and shuts itself down to recover, this crashes all 3D rendering and thus "soft crashes" (as in white-screens) the Viewer)). Depth of Field. If you happen to turn its resolution to 1.0 and tweak it to have a strong blur effect it runs through many iterations of the already very calculation intensive loop that will quickly put ANY GPU to its place in the dump, no GPU in this world can take this without dropping you to near single digit framerates. But Depth of Field is optional and doesn't use any processing power if it isn't used. This goes for all graphic effects obviously. Most of which are disabled by default in Black Dragon. The only additional effects Black Dragon comes with by default is Color Correction and Tone Mapping both of which are super cheap simple color alteration calculations any GPU won't even notice.

As i said BD doesn't use more resources (at least not in comparable settings). It CAN use more as in it is capable of doing so because it features extra features making additional use (beyond what SL by default uses) and will actually attempt to do so but not because extra features are enabled but because the already running features have been modified to do so most of which is done by settings, some are shader tweaks and cannot be tweaked. The settings however can be changed to reflect what you'd see in Firestorm in which case BD would use less resources since it does effectively less and better optimized than FS. Some of the effects have been optimized (like shadow resolution) and any freed up resources have been put to use on other things, like shadow precision which was raised. The problem is that these kind of things tend to be wildly different. If we look at a grassy place with lots of grass patches (small objects) all over the place, you will see your framerate drop hard when you get closer. This is a problem with shadow precision for instance as it CAN require many times more resources to calculate these small objects that were previously not subject to shadows (due to inaccuracy). Generally speaking though BD uses less resources (if you were to put the settings the same as other Viewers) but may make more use of your available hardware depending on the settings. This is not counting the random nature of SL. I've had people tell me they have vastly better framerates and then other people with very similar or better hardware have much worse performance compared to other Viewers. I'd lean out the window though and say its most likely their settings.

There's a measly 2% usage difference for a massive visual difference and these 2% can be attributed to SL's total randomness, same with the ~30mb VRAM less usage in my Viewer, could be just a couple random textures less being loaded. I also noticed that more UI results in more CPU calculations which lowers GPU usage slightly due to the GPU starting to wait on the CPU, which means that the couple extra buttons the SL Viewer has visible might contribute to the 2% difference. Both Viewers used the same major settings, i didn't alter my default SSAO and Glow settings, they shouldn't make a noticeable difference, if anything they would just increase the 2% gap. I also did not disable Tone Mapping and Color Correction both again making no visible GPU usage difference. The above scene is a second to worst-case scenario since there's lot of grass patches and i know the Viewer quickly loses fps around those. Surprisingly my Viewer has average 11 FPS more than the latest official Viewer. Now Firestorm i don't want to test. With knowing that increased CPU work lowers GPU usage and Firestorm themselves even claiming that Firestorm uses a lot more processing power due to all the additional things running (on your CPU) you'll most likely see noticeably lower GPU usage rates, which would explain why so many people complain that Firestorm doesn't use their PC... the reality is more like the CPU is bottlenecking and the GPU doesn't even get to do something, which in turn would just explain why people see increased hardware usage, since the usage is spread more evenly across CPU/GPU/RAM resulting in overall less bottlenecking and more usage (but also more FPS as the above images show), the increased hardware usage in turn would explain why so many people think BD needs better hardware when it actually doesn't. It has the same requirements as the Official Viewer since 99.9% of it is based on it. A potato can run BD (i even added a warning for that).

Coming back to your framerate drops, as i commented to AdminGirl, framerate drops are totally normal regardless of your hardware, you can have a beastly machine (one of my friends has one of those 2 GPU, latest Intel CPU death machines) and he sees radically different framerates than i do (upwards of twice as much as i get) and he will drop close to single digit frmaerates with just one checkbox and 1-2 sliders. This is an universal issue and simply unfixable, you are going out of the "reasonable" range of settings, what happens is that the Viewer will simply collapse under the snowballing amount of work it has to do. This is just how photography in SL is. You WILL see low framerates, at least in already intense areas, if not you'll see them when you get to the point you are raising the settings to unreasonable values. Which is often not even needed. I find so many users just pull shadow resolution up for instance and then wonder why the framerate starts committing suicide... when the shadows are either not even visible (or everywhere thus making additional details and precision obsolete) or already detailed enough because there is nothing in the scene that needs detailed shadows (such as tree leaves).

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Um i guess i got a bit distracted there... crashes. There are no hardware limitations that cause the Viewer to outright crash except how big the snapshot can be taken in safely. I have not investigated this enough but my guess is that this might be a VRAM issue, if the scene already uses up the entire available VRAM the chances seem to be increased that you will crash on big snapshot sizes (starting just above 4K and up) though i've seen people taking 12K shots with GTX 900 series but i'd generally say 4K is always a safe option, i've never seen 4K crash even with crazy unrealistic settings (such as forcing textures to load at full res and basically trying to load 12GB of textures into my poor 6GB card). Don't quote me on it though, this is just my observation.

Edited September 12, 2020 by NiranV Dean

[Nalates Urriah]

CRASHES...

Blaming the viewer is not always fair. Windows versions, graphics drivers, memory limits, the computer's chipsets and drivers, and a number of other factors contribute to viewer crashes. 

My experience as of the time I write this is Firestorm EEP Beta is crashing way more than any other viewer I use, Win10 2004 update, Nvidia 436.48, i5-6600k (overclocked), and 32GB Ram. I forget the last time Black Dragon crashed. I do use it less than FS. BD is for posing and pictures. But I do take pictures with FS. 

A friend trying to take pictures with an old laptop and Firestorm (not sure which version) has to relog every 3 or 4th shot or crash. I can do snaps all day and seldom crash.

My point is it takes quite a bit of work to nail down where the problem actually is. And most of us are having different experiences. It isn't until EVERYBODY is crashing on a particular version of a viewer that we can blame it.

SHARPENING...

It is an art. So whatever method one uses, it can be done poorly.

One of the simplest sharpening tricks is to take a high res image and reduce the rez for the final image. While this is simple not all image editors reduce resolution as well as others. Photoshop has about 6 ways to change the resolution. The SL Blogosphere has debated which is best. My experience is which is best varies with some images looking better with one of the less recommended processes.