Photography School and Editing With Gimp

[drxpn]

can someone teach me how to take pictures on here in HD QULAITY with the different windlights and effects  am an inspiring blogger and i also want to learn how to edit secondlife avater pictures using gimp my pc doesn't hold photoshop everytime i try my pc crashes im willing to pay you in lindens for your time.

[Rowan Amore]

1 hour ago, drxpn said:

can someone teach me how to take pictures on here in HD QULAITY with the different windlights and effects  am an inspiring blogger and i also want to learn how to edit secondlife avater pictures using gimp my pc doesn't hold photoshop everytime i try my pc crashes im willing to pay you in lindens for your time.

Here's a good place to start.

On 12/1/2020 at 5:38 PM, Orwar said:

   I've gone over this a bit in the past, but I keep seeing people who constantly shoot with the default zoom - and as I found myself a little bit bored, I thought I'd might as well write a little guide focusing on this aspect of photography in Second Life.

   I'm going to talk in Firestorm terms, but I believe the standard viewer functions similarly, and Black Dragon largely does as well although has some differences in its UI.

   First off, you'll need to make sure you're using the right tool. Firestorm has both Camera Controls, and Phototools Camera.

   On the left is the Camera Controls, and on the right is the Phototools Camera - which confusingly just says 'Cameratools' on the UI. To find the right button, right-click on any of the shortcuts on your UI and click 'Toolbar buttons ...'; grab the Phototools Camera and drop it wherever you want it (personally I keep all of my photo and camera tools on the right side of my screen, including Phototools, which is for editing windlights and controlling DOF, the snapshot tool, i.e. the camera itself, etc.).

   In the first tab (Cam Controls 1), you essentially have the same things as you do in the Camera Controls UI. The circle with the arrows is for orbiting the camera (around whichever is your focal point), and the square box with the arrow on it is for panning. You can do both things 'freehand' with your mouse as well; hold down Ctrl + Alt for orbiting, and Ctrl + Alt + Shift for panning, then simply left-click and drag your mouse to move about. Between the two you have a simple slider for moving your camera closer or further away (note that this is 'physically' moving your camera, and not zooming as in reducing the depth of field - which we'll get to in a minute).

   Below those tools, you have 5 buttons (the eye, the spinny arrow with arrows around it, the camera, the eye with a down-arrow and the eye with an up-arrow). From left to right, these are:

• Preset views (changes the UI above the buttons to let you pick from 3 preset viewpoints; front view, side view, and rear view - this isn't really important for photography as you'll be using the free camera view anyway)
• Orbit Zoom Pan (displays the circle and square section as in the picture above)
• Camera Modes (again, a button you'll hardly ever need - object view, which is what you should be in, is what you want to be in. The other option is mouselook, which is more easily accessed with M on your keyboard. It's also not really for photography, as your UI access is extremely limited - this is more for driving and looking around; it's basically first person view)
• Save current camera position (this is an extremely important feature. Clicking that button saves your camera's current position and rotation, allowing you to hop right back to where you were with ... )
• Load stored camera position ( ... This button.)

   Now we get to the more technical stuff, but fear not - it's not actually any difficult once we get past the view angle.

• View angle: this is your field of view. And what is that? That is how wide your vision arc is; the default value (unless I've tampered with it and forgot) is 1.048rads - which is roughly 60 degrees. Increasing this value will increase the amount of stuff that you cram into your vision, whilst decreasing it will spread out whatever you're looking at to appear wider.
• Zoom Speed: this is basically a delay feature. If you increase it and move your camera, it will move slower and more 'smoothly'. Personally I find it annoying, and have it at 0.
• Camera Lag: same but different, also has more to do with how the camera reacts to movement, which doesn't tend to apply to photography unless you're doing some Pollock type shenanigans. 
• Camera Offset: offsets your camera to the default position, which again is more up to how you usually move and interact with the world.
• Camera Smoothing: softens and slows down the camera movements. Put it really high, up your mouse sensitivity to max, lock on something and twirl for an instant bout of wanting to get off the bloody carousel. Not really relevant to photography either.

   As you can see, the main feature here is the view angle. And now, as a minute has passed, let's look at what it all means.

   Meet Ne-- Holy goat. Okay, that's an awkward image. That's with the camera near her face, and the view angle at 1.048 radians. This is what we call fish-eye view. Let's try zooming in a little, and moving the camera back - oh, and some people bang on about how you can zoom with Ctrl + 8 (out), 9 (reset), and 0 (in), but personally I prefer making a conscious choice of how many rads I'm at, rather than counting clicks and hoping for the best. To each their own!

   Okay, that's a bit better. Camera angle hasn't changed, only the zoom and distance. This is at 0.700 rads, it's looking a lot better, isn't it? What if we keep zooming though ...

   Now we're down to 0.300 rads, and it's looking pretty good! But let's go all the way.

   Now we're at 0.080 rads. Notice how her ponytail is popping up and her ears are coming out? This may be a little too close, perhaps. Well, not 'close', let's see what happens if I reset the view angle (with the handy D-button next to its numerals).

   At this distance you'll probably have to communicate with hand signs. So to reiterate - this image and the image just prior are shot without moving the camera at all, it's only the zoom. Okay so, if I want to make a nice closeup shot, what should I use? Well, there aren't any strict rules, personally I tend to go somewhere between 0.120 - 0.240 rads for close-ups.

   At 0.180 rads, I feel like it's pretty balanced, but 0.300 is probably the more 'correct' if we compare to RL camera lenses - the ears are coming out a little, but that's also just part of Neph's anatomy. I think it's cute! 

   This doesn't mean that you should shoot everything in that span though. If I wanted to do a waist-up shot, I reckon something like 0.300 - 0.700 is more like it, depending on how much 'else' I want in there. And if you're doing landscape photography, upping the radians beyond the default view can let you capture more stuff. Theoretically, anyway - my landscape photography skills are pretty much non-existent. 

   All right, that's enough of Neph. Let's look back to the Phototools Camera.

   In the second tab you have two sections, one for how the camera functions in mouselook. Again, this isn't really relevant to photography - but if you do like using it for moving it around or driving, it can absolutely be worthwhile having a gander at it. Especially 'Display avatar in mouselook'. You can now look at your own toes! The other section here does have one relevant option if you're doing machinimas or shooting gifs; 'reset camera view on avatar movement' - untick it, and your camera won't move when you do, if you've locked it onto anything immobile. 

   In the third tab, it's mostly about 3D camera, which as far as I've understood it requires a joystick or controller. It's not really required, but a lot of people who use Black Dragon seem to be enjoying the camera roll feature (which you can do there without a joystick). Arguably people appear to enjoy it a bit too much. But that's a discussion for the pet peeve thread.

   So, there we have it. How to move your camera in SL. 

 

 

[Orwar]

   Hm, well that guide only really covers the camera controls and zoom. To take a 'HD' picture you'll need to use a viewer that allows higher resolution renderings (not sure whether the standard viewer has that option), such as Firestorm or Black Dragon Viewer. 

   As far as windlights go, and lighting in general, that's a whole little science of its own. You'll want to turn on ambient occlusion and the advanced lighting model in your viewer to make the most out of the in-viewer lighting. You can browse the windlights and just look for something that appeals to you, or you can edit (or create a whole new) windlight to manually set up the lighting - you can also work with local lighting (i.e. prims creating light) to have even more control over how your scene is lit.

   For blogging photography it's also important that you understand poses and avatar shapes, and how to adjust your avatar to fit a pose (or find poses that fit your avatar), as well as that you know how to adjust attachments (floating or clipping necklaces and gravity-defying earrings can make a picture look off real quick). 

   Then you have your general photography practices for framing and composition, and your rules (such as the rule of thirds, and the rule of breaking the rules). You can learn a lot by reading 'real' photographer blogs as it's all applicable to SL as well.

   Finally you have editing, which again is its whole thing. The bare minimum for blogging should be that you can at least fix up neck seams, touch up shadows a little, and work with the lighting and pallet if needed - as well as putting in a signature.

 

   I did a somewhat longer post a while back where I showed the whole process of building a makeshift backdrop, setting up a completely dark windlight, creating a three-point lighting setup, setting up the camera and framing the shot ... But it's probably a few pages down on the photography board by now. 

[Rowan Amore]

38 minutes ago, Orwar said:

   Hm, well that guide only really covers the camera controls and zoom. To take a 'HD' picture you'll need to use a viewer that allows higher resolution renderings (not sure whether the standard viewer has that option), such as Firestorm or Black Dragon Viewer. 

   As far as windlights go, and lighting in general, that's a whole little science of its own. You'll want to turn on ambient occlusion and the advanced lighting model in your viewer to make the most out of the in-viewer lighting. You can browse the windlights and just look for something that appeals to you, or you can edit (or create a whole new) windlight to manually set up the lighting - you can also work with local lighting (i.e. prims creating light) to have even more control over how your scene is lit.

   For blogging photography it's also important that you understand poses and avatar shapes, and how to adjust your avatar to fit a pose (or find poses that fit your avatar), as well as that you know how to adjust attachments (floating or clipping necklaces and gravity-defying earrings can make a picture look off real quick). 

   Then you have your general photography practices for framing and composition, and your rules (such as the rule of thirds, and the rule of breaking the rules). You can learn a lot by reading 'real' photographer blogs as it's all applicable to SL as well.

   Finally you have editing, which again is its whole thing. The bare minimum for blogging should be that you can at least fix up neck seams, touch up shadows a little, and work with the lighting and pallet if needed - as well as putting in a signature.

 

   I did a somewhat longer post a while back where I showed the whole process of building a makeshift backdrop, setting up a completely dark windlight, creating a three-point lighting setup, setting up the camera and framing the shot ... But it's probably a few pages down on the photography board by now. 

You mean these?

 

On 3/3/2020 at 10:46 AM, Orwar said:

   I got tired of my workflow being a few squiggly lines on a piece of scrap paper in my desk drawer, and as the subject of 'Gimp vs. Photoshop' came up (yet again) in a Discord chat, I figured that I should re-format it, and that I might as well share it here.

   Before I dive into the Gimp part (because obviously I use Gimp, which is superior and also free!), there are a few principles that starts in SL itself, and different workflows depending on what I'm doing. The rule of thumb is always to do as much work as possible in SL, and as little editing as required to reach the desired effect; this means that the pose, the backdrop, the lighting, the framing, and (almost always) the DOF should all be spot on before I open Gimp - and there's no crime in taking a shot to look at it, decide to adjust something and then move back to re-take it until it's where you want it, whether it's changing the camera position or the lighting intensity or the DOF sliders.

   On a good day, the only editing required is:

• Blend neck seams.
• Add signature.

   But sometimes you'll want to do something more 'artsy' in the editing process, and occasionally you've got a shot which requires more fixing (a shot not taken in a studio, or in a shoot you wrapped before realizing there was an error). If any of this is required, then you'll want to complete this before you start adding filters and effects - and it's also the point at which you do the layering, if you're doing a layered shot.

   Did an animation wherein your shoulder popped backwards? Someone got a leg going through a skirt, or an arm going through their hip or gut? I don't know what the 'proper' term is, if there is one aside from 'correcting' it; I like to call it 'reconstructive photo-surgery', because I'm a weirdo. This assumes that there's only one layer of the shot, or that even with multiple layers, there's an issue that needs correcting (if you're doing image layering, that may come first though). At this stage you'll primarily be using the paint brush, smudge tool and heal tool, to rebuild the missing or broken things.

   So what do I mean when I talk about 'image layering'? It's when you want to wear a hair and a hat, but can't get the two to work together in-world without extensive clipping or having to deform the hat until it's more of a tent than a bonnet. In a studio setup, you can solve this by taking two shots - one with the hair, and one with the hat, then lay the hat layer on top of the other one and use alpha masks to just put the hat on. Or a coat over a shirt, or a necklace that clips with your shirt collar, or anything else really that collides with something else. 

   Once you've got the shot fixed up so that there are no seams or clipping, you're ready to begin adding any effects or filters that you may want to do. 

   Personally I've found myself using and making filters less and less, not only because of the 'raw shot puritans' raging on the forums, but because I've learned to set up my lighting and stuff in the viewer - looking back at photos I did even just one year back, yikes, the excessive use of Softglow (why did I ever--) and other filters making the contrasts much too hard and the colours appear posturized, ugh. But there still are some features that I use to some extent on occasion. Sharpening (unsharpen mask) can be a great way to pick out some detail, especially on portraits, to make eyelashes and pores pop, layering a desaturated copy of the image (or just playing with the slider, because Gimp now has a slider - yay!) to make the shot appear, well, less saturated (gloomier!), and of course film grain (i.e. HSV noise - 'cause the cool kids do it!). I've also done a few shots where I've tested out the whole anaglyph thing (again 'cause of the cool kids) and found that .. Nope, just no. I'll leave those shenanigans to the pop star wannabe bloggers - after all, how dark do you appear when it looks like you're at a disco doing LSD? 

   And finally there's the signature - easily done, just make a signature that you copy-paste into your pic. Well, I used to do that at least, but I've gone from an underlined, two-line black letter logo with wavy effects to just a single line, all minuscule fraktur, which I just quickly type in by hand, align to the corner I want it in, and then drag it out a few pixels from the edges and set to a high transparency to make it more discrete. But that's just me. 

   Glances up at the text wall to figure out whether I actually made any point.

   . . . So, I hope you found that, uh. Educational? Inspirational? Entertaining?

 

On 8/19/2019 at 5:55 AM, Orwar said:

   We have a pretty large community of photography enthusiasts here on the forums, and whilst there are plenty of blogs and guides out there, it's not always easy to find what you're looking for, if you're unfamiliar with the terminologies and techniques used. There are a handful of forumite photography groups both in-world and on Flickr, but most of them are for showing off your pictures and the occasional banter, or meeting up to do collaborative shots - I'd like to dedicate this thread to one thing which isn't always addressed head-on, though; how people actually set up and take their shots.

   There are of course various methods, and different people have their own favourite ways of doing things - it's difficult, if not impossible, to say which method is the 'best'. Whichever works and give you the results you want, is a good way!

   This thread may also act as a recepticle for other threads or external sources - feel free to share earlier works, or writing up your tips and tricks, or making your own tutorials.

   To kick this thread off, I'm going to go over my own go-to setup, including: building a prim backdrop (and how to make a green screen), setting up your in-world camera, and lighting your scene.

Building a Prim Backdrop

   To build a backdrop, you need to be in an area where you have rez rights - you'll need a prim allowance of two.

   Press Ctrl + B on your keyboard to open the build menu, select a cube and click anywhere on the ground to rez it. In the edit window, make sure that "Snap" is ticked in and grab the blue arrow; this will move the prim on its Z-axis - but rather than moving the cursor up or down along the arrow's path, drag your cursor sideways until the cube snaps onto the grid ruler. You can put the backdrop at whichever altitude suits you, but for simplicity's sake, make sure that it is snapped to the ruler.

   Once you have snapped the cube into position, let go of the cursor. For the next step, you could change the edit mode to stretch and just drag it - but let's instead change tab on the edit window to 'Object'. In here, find the size parameters. I usually go for a 4 x 4 x 0.5 meter prim, this is generally adequately large to cover the screen whilst shooting - if you need it larger, you can make it as large or small as you require.

   So let's put 4, 4 and .5 into the X, Y and Z parameters to build ourselves a floor prim.

   Now, let's align our prim on the X and Y axis as well. This is done just the same as with the Z axis - grab the red arrow, drag your cursor sideways until you're snapped onto the ruler, and snap it onto nearest full meter mark; then do the same with the green arrow.

   Next, we need a wall. You can either press Ctrl + B again to create a new cube - but let's instead copy our existing prim. To do this, hold down the Shift key and pull the floor sideways - a duplicate of it will be created, pull it whilst snapping it to the grid, until the two prim floors are butted up against one another. Now grab the blue arrow and snap it 0.5 meters up, so that you have a hollow corner - like this:

   Now you just have two floors, though - let's make that second floor a wall instead. Whilst you can go to the edit window and change the size there - or simply rotate the prim 90 degrees - these will both put your prims out of alignment. Instead, select the 'Stretch' option in the edit window and, again using the grid ruler, pull the prim's far edge (the red or green cube, depending which direction of the floor you put the second prim!) towards the floor, until it is .5 meters thick.

   Now, grab the upper blue stretch point and drag it, once again on the grid ruler, until it's 4 meters tall. Once you have done this, you're finished with the structural part of the backdrop - but plywood doesn't make for a very nice backdrop texture, let's have a look at texturing this structure.

   If you de-selected the prims, right-click and Edit either one of them, then hold down shift and mouse-click on the second prim to select both. If you'd like, you can at this point press 'Link' in the edit window, to 'glue' the two parts together (note how the outline of the prim you selected first turns blue!). Next, go to the Texture tab in the edit window, and you'll find a window in which the current plywood texture is displayed; click it to open the texture selector - in the new window, you can browse the textures in your inventory, but what we want to do is make the whole thing blank. For this, there's a button labeled 'blank' - click it good!

   You now have a white backdrop, all ready to use!

   However, if you want a wholly white background to your photo, unaffected by the lighting you're going to use, you'll want to tick the 'Full Bright' button between the texture selector and the colour picker. Actually, if you don't want a plain, white backdrop, go ahead and do that now. If, like me, you like to shoot in a dark scene, a sudden camera control mishap can get you quite lost - having the backdrop full bright will make it easier for you to navigate your camera back to the scene again; however, now we're faced with a potential trouble - if you pop up a full bright backdrop in your garden, the neighbors may be none so pleased. We can remedy this by moving our build to a building platform, out of sight from the otherwise impeccable neighborhood.

   Go back to the Object tab, find the 'Position' parameters, and in the Z parameter insert an altitude (always check your land's covenant for rules regarding skybox and platform altitudes first!) - I'm going to pop mine at, say, 800 meters. Press Enter, and-- Poof. It's gone! You could do what I did for years, and simply press down and hold the jump button until you've flown up to the altitude of your backdrop, but that may take a while - instead, press the 'Home' button on your keyboard to toggle flying on (same button to turn it off), and press Ctrl + M to open your map. Insert the same altitude into the location's Z parameter (far right of the three coordinate selectors) and press Enter - you'll now have a waypoint way up in the sky; simply press Teleport to go to it!

   There she is! Which reminds me - for the sake of not making your inventory quite so messy, you can name your backdrop by going to the 'General' tab in the Edit window and simply change the name from 'Object' to... Hm. I shall call mine-- Drahoslava von Backdroppen.

   Okay, so let's talk about texturing options. If you want to make a chromakey shot, you can simply edit the backdrop, click 'select face' in the Edit window, mark the inner wall and floor faces and turn them whichever colour you wish to use for your chromakey (usually green, for 'green screen' - but that may not always be the case; perhaps someone will come along with a chromakey tutorial down the line?!).

   Personally, I tend to go with a dark gray, so I select the same two faces, turn off the full bright on those, and in the colour picker I pick a gray.

   Of course, you can use other textures, too, rather than using a blank backdrop. I'm going to show you two variants of this; a local texture from my disk, and a texture plus its materials that I have in my inventory.

   First, from inventory:

   Select the two faces, go to the Texture tab in the Edit window, click the blank texture to open the texture selector, and browse your inventory to find your texture in your inventory. Also, if you tinted the face earlier, turn the colour back to white first!

   I can then add my normal and specular maps to the same faces, by changing which layer of the face to put my textures on.

   Well. I'm out of space for attachment uploads for this post, so I'll post the other guides following this one instead. Hmpf!

   But first, let's talk about using Local textures - if you don't want to upload a texture to SL permanently (costs L$10!), you can temporarily upload a local texture. You do this by selecting the Local option in the texture selector, and uploading your file from your computer:

   Okay, so, this turned out more of a building tutorial than a photography one - but I'll start typing away on the camera setup and lighting setup right away - watch this space!

 

On 8/19/2019 at 7:52 AM, Orwar said:

Setting up your Second Life Camera

   All right then, now that we have a backdrop to shoot against, let's talk about camera setup. First things first though, to frame our shot-- Well, we need a subject, don't we? This can be a still life subject or a portrait, or anything you like. I'm going to simply nab Neph and pop her on a poseball!

   <Intermission for getting Neph dressed and dolled up>

   There - now I'll just have to get her to stop blinking, and we should be ready to begin.

   What we'll want to do now, is turn our attention to the Cameratools. Since I'll be doing a portrait, the first thing I'll have to decide on is my zoom, or 'View Angle'. You can tug the slider, some people will SWEAR by using the button shortcuts, but personally I like to have the Cameratools open whilst shooting anyway, for reasons that'll be made obvious soon. For a portrait, as I'll demonstrate here, I'll want to go with 0.350 rads - so I just pop that into the view angle.

   Here's how it looks with the default (1.048 rads) view:

   And this is with 0.350 rads:

   And yes, that's only by changing the camera zoom - both shots are taken with the same camera position!

   Now, let's frame our shot. I almost always use an aspect ratio of either 3:4 (portrait) or 4:3 (landscape), always dividable by 256 pixels (i.e. 768 x 1024 for a 3:4 shot in low resolution, or a 4608 x 6144 pixels for a full resolution shot). For this scene, I'll use a 3:4 format. So I open my camera, and put 768 x 1024 pixels into its size - make sure to unecheck 'Constrain proportions' first!

   ... I then change my mind about the rads and decide to just go for a -really- close close-up, and zoom to 0.200 rads. Why? Because I felt like it.

   Whenever I move the camera, I hit the Refresh button in my camera, and check the display to see how the framing looks. Looks good? Good. Looks meh? Try altering your angle. Can't get the angle to work? Try another angle!

   Now, a very important pair of buttons in the Cameratools, are these here little fellows:

   Those are for SAVING and LOADING your camera position. Once you've framed your shot, SAVE your camera position, so that you can re-load it later on. Down-eye = save, up-eye = load. Note that you can only save one position at a time, and if you hit the save button again, you immediately overwrite your previously saved position.

   Once you've framed your shot, there's just one more thing before taking the shot - let's light this pitch up!

Lighting your Scene (using prims!)

   First things first, let's click the D (default) button on the View Angle in the Cameratools - navigating your scene and setting up your lights with that zoom can be outright obnoxious!

   Now, just as when we made the backdrop, we're going to need us some cubes. Press Ctrl + B to create yourself a cube - we're going to use 3 cubes for now, and do a 3-point lighting setup with these. Here's a sketch I nabbed off zhe Internets, displaying how a 3-point lighting is set up:

Credits: www.reelmarketer.com

   The idea is to make sure that your subject is well lit, but that there are gradients of intensity from different directions. For this shoot, we're going to work with one spotlight/projector (the key light) and two point lights (back and fill). Let's start with the key light; rez a prim cube, and move it so that it is a short bit away from your subject (or rather, the part of the subject you intend to shoot!). I generally turn my cubes into white, blank, full bright cubes so that I can easily spot them when working in a dark scene!

   Now, in the Edit window, go to the Features tab of the prim. Here you'll find the tick box for turning the prim into a light source, as well as the texture selector in which you turn your light (point light by default) into a spotlight (you can use any texture - or even 'blank', but I have made a texture with a circle with a gradiant edge for this purpose, to get a soft, round spotlight).

   At this point you may notice that the light, well, there isn't any? At least if you rezzed this box on the floor. That's because the projector light projects its lighting on the Z axis of the prim - we'll have to rotate it, as well as position it. Also - you must have Advanced Lighting Model activated in your preferences' graphic settings for this to work (or even the option to make a projector to appear, I believe).

   Once we have flipped the prim on its side so that it projects its light horizontally, we change the reference of movement to 'Local', and drag it so that the blue arrow points away from the subject's face, and that the blue trace line is lined up with it.

   Now, we create two more prims for the back and fill lights - you can use projector lights, but be wary of how your shadows end up looking. For now, I'm going to use to simple point lights.

   From above, here's how it looks on my end at this point. Now we can shot, right? Well, not quite. We need to adjust our lights, and also decide what to do about the Windlight! I'm sure someone else will be happy to make a WL tutorial down the line - me, I don't use them much; instead, I'm going to go into my menu and find the Windlight called "Phototools- No Light"

   Much as the name suggests, this Windlight contains no light. It'll be pitch black. Good thing we put those lights up, huh?

   So, the scene is set, the picture is framed, now we get to the part where we tinker with our light's options to make the lighting look good. We'll want to reduce the intensity of our back and fill lights to begin with. Usually, the ratios are 100% for front light, 50% for fill light, and 20% for the back light. So let's begin by changing the intensities of the point lights to .5 and .2 respectively.

   As to not make the thread too heavy - again - I'm not going to show a before and after picture here; test it out for yourselves and trust me, it makes a big difference! Poor Neph with her pale skin looked positively ghostly with all that light flooding her from every direction!

   Now we can go back to our camera, load our camera position and set the zoom back to whatever we wanted to go with, and see how it looks in the camera preview. In my case, it feels as if the lighting is too 'sharp' - we haven't changed the falloff at all. As far as I've heard, 2.0 in falloff is how 'natural' light behaves, but I find it often makes the scene look, well, dull. I'll check my boxes and see what I end up with.

   Personally, I also like to add a slight tint of blue to my key light, usually a very, very light blue. If you want to replicate daylight, you can also use orange or yellow tones - or, you can make a light effect by using a sharp, saturated colour.

   At this state we just mull back and forth between the camera and the lights, adjusting back and forth until we're happy with how it looks - you can also save a lower resolution shot to your computer and open it in full-screen to have a closer look. When you're all happy with it, bump the size up as far as you can or want to go - and snap away!

   Here's a 1024 x 768 sample of what I took (yes, I changed my mind about the aspect ratio, and angle, once I had the scene lit up!):

   And here it is after trimming, re-touching, focus blurring and all that.

   Well, there it is. Enjoy!

 

[Orwar]

2 minutes ago, RowanMinx said:

You mean these?

   Ooh, yes ...

   ... They feel a bit outdated and rambly. I should probably do something about that. Also darn, was I rushing to finish that last one (had a bunch of upload errors because the forums were being silly), that portrait of Neph is absolutely terrible. She looks like she was feeling pretty done with it as well!

[Rowan Amore]

1 minute ago, Orwar said:

   Ooh, yes ...

   ... They feel a bit outdated and rambly. I should probably do something about that. Also darn, was I rushing to finish that last one (had a bunch of upload errors because the forums were being silly), that portrait of Neph is absolutely terrible. She looks like she was feeling pretty done with it as well!

The information in them is totally valid and a great resource for anyone interested in photography in SL.  I, myself, have learned a few new things from your ramblings so please don't stop.

[NiranV Dean]

5 hours ago, Orwar said:

Finally you have editing, which again is its whole thing. The bare minimum for blogging should be that you can at least fix up neck seams, touch up shadows a little, and work with the lighting and pallet if needed - as well as putting in a signature.

I've been blogging wrong all this time! I didn't know i should edit my pictures before posting them.

[Laurel Aurelia]

This is just an observation of my own work, but  it seems that the more I fuss with something in post, the less I like the image in the end. What I do find interesting is listening to how others make decisions about their creations, especially when our styles are very different.  The best advice I could give for anyone who was wanting to take pictures in SL as a hobby, and want to grow their skills and develop their own creative voice is to just start playing around with the tools.  In general HD images are created by taking your snap shots in the highest resolution your computer can manage. I definitely prefer the way my images look in the Black Dragon viewer over Firestorm even with just with the basic settings it comes with when you initially download it. I can never get DOF to look right in Firestorm , and have never really been pleased with the results when I've tried to add it in after the fact.

With all that said, if you are looking for really in-depth tutorials on taking pictures in SL I always recommend Anya Ohmai's series on youtube, and while it is a few years old, it definitely holds up.

Edited December 8, 2020 by Laurel Aurelia
spelling >.<

[Orwar]

3 hours ago, Laurel Aurelia said:

I can never get DOF to look right in Firestorm

   DOF in Firestorm feels pretty borked, to be fair. The way it treats alphas just, bleh - BDW certainly has a better tool for DOF.

[Nalates Urriah]

On 12/8/2020 at 11:30 AM, Laurel Aurelia said:

I can never get DOF to look right in Firestorm , and have never really been pleased with the results when I've tried to add it in after the fact.

Yeah... FS DOF is flaky. Only in certain scenarios does it work well. 

Adding DoF blur in post is tricky. While this is a GIMP thread I will mention that Photoshop has a wide set of tools for controlling the DoF effects, not just one or two, to make the point it is tricky. I have used FS and BD's DEPTH maps to control the DoF effect in several of my SL images via post editing.

The GIMP tutorials I looked at provide weak ways of doing DoF in post. I did find one that uses a third party add-on to work on the removal of the subject they wanted to remain in focus. See YouTube GIMP DoF. PAINT.NET was no better. Neither of them seem to have a way to import a mask or to paste one in. So, I'm not knowledgeable enough to say how to use the viewer's depth image to mask in your image. But, that would be a simple way to go for a professional looking post DoF.

[Orwar]

1 hour ago, Nalates Urriah said:

Neither of them seem to have a way to import a mask or to paste one in.

   In Gimp you can.

   Simply open the depth image to your project, select it, and copy (Ctrl + C). Then create a duplicate of your working layer, run a gaussian blur filter over it, right-click it, add layer mask, select the mask and paste the depth map (Ctrl + V) - then anchor the floating layer onto the layer mask. You can then tinker with the contrast and different depth intensities by using the colour select tool to increase or decrease the opacity of the various depths.

   Wrote a guide on that too.