HiQ photography in SL, Part 4: Edit with Gimp, the cheap way

Many people don't have the funds necessary for buying Photoshop and end up using a cracked (and possibly infected) illegal copy or some really bad editing solutions.

However there is a completely legal and really good quality alternative available for you. This article tries to recreate the workflow I showed in an earlier article about working with Photoshop but with this alternative instead.

The Gimp is a free (as in no cost) open source tool very similar to Photoshop and you can do almost anything you can with Photoshop in in a similar way. It also has the same kind of tools and is organized in the same way. With the proper training you can achieve the same quality with a program that costs...... nothing more than your effort.

There are versions for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux and translations exists for many languages... like my native Swedish (and that you will see in the screenshots below). You can download it here:
http://www.gimp.org/

If you are used to Photoshop you will find the the default shortcuts rather different. However that is no problem as you can set your own shortcuts for almost anything in the program. Look above to see the menu for that. I find it easy to search for a tool in that settings instead of digging for it. I have set my most used Photoshop shortcuts to be the same in The Gimp like:

Resize: alt + cmd + S
Layers: cmd + L
Contrast: cmd + K
Saturation: cmd + U
Brush tool: B
Crop tool: C
and so on......

In the rest of the article I will use those shortcuts above, but if you do not change them they will be completely different.

My workflow is like this:

1. Open the file in The Gimp.

Never make a photo bigger without special tools for that, because it will degrade horrible. There are plugins and other tools to do that because it needs to interpolate the new pixels, but these tools are rather expensive. So best is only to keep pictures at the original size or to make them smaller.

2. Start with crop. Shortcut = C. Hold down and drag with the mouse to get an even square if you plan to post at flickr, because square photos looks best there. Press enter when you have the right size of your crop.

If you plan to use them in your profile... have a look at this page for details: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Limits

3.Look under Textures on that page, for the correct proportions for picks and profile. There is video for showing how to do that in photoshop. Look at the video a bit down on that page.

4. Set the levels if the important part are too dark. Ctrl-L (CMD-L on Mac) opens the Levels tool. Often there is no info staples at the rightmost part like in this image. The photo is badly exposed in photo language. If so drag the rightmost handle to the left until it touches the staples of black.

I hope you see the difference between those two images. I happens quite often that SL photos gets this way and are wrongly exposed in my opinion. Now you know the trick to fix that...  ;-)

Sometimes you have staples to the right but it still looks to dark, then you can try to move the middle handle to get it to look right.

5. I think it is almost always necessary to increase saturation in the images from SL.
Ctrl-U (CMD-U on the Mac) opens the Saturation tool. For me it is often +15 increase or so.

As you see I have a Swedish version of The Gimp, but I think you will be able to find the right spot in your version of The Gimp despite that.

6. Make the final size. I normally choose 800 or 600 pixel at the longest size, that works good on Flickr and blog sites. If it is already smaller then that's so... just leave it. Never make a photo bigger without special tools. Use the shortcuts CMD-ALT-S on Mac (I think it is Ctrl-alt-S on PC).

Now be sure that the link tool (marked by the arrow here) is turned on so that the proportions dont gets changed. Then enter 700 in the example above in the field with the highest number).

7. Sharpen it. This is always the final step and must be done after the photo is in its final size. Use the built-in unsharp mask filter for this. There are also some more advanced and free plugins for The Gimp and you will find them on the links above.

Settings: Amount=0.50 (if you get white borders like sugar crust at hight contrast areas, then lower to 0.4),  Radius= 5.0, Treshold= 0...... thats it.

8. Save as: PNG (Use only JPG if you have to make them smaller in filesize for some reasob).

Voila! You are done....

Now the next time you are using the free Gimp instead of expensive Photoshop or some really bad tool... think a nice thought about me...   ;o)

Ben

Moving.... to a new paradise and escaping misery

When real life is as miserable as it is right now for me, it is absolutely wonderful to be able to escape into the paradise we are creating for ourselves here in Tangelo. Things are really beginning to shape up and we have now done the waters and some planting.  So much fun work still needs to be done...

 Marlia bought us a new great spa instead of a normal house. I always have problems manoeuvring in small spaces so this kind of open places are perfect for me. If we want privacy we have the oriental palace in the sky.

There are so many great details in that palace, look at the frosted glass in the photo below... I am such a freak for details...   ;-)

At the moment Marlia and I are participating in the great Fairy Tale hunt. That is so much fun as you get to see so many new places and receive so many nice gifts. Marlia is miles ahead of me... on one of the places she got this great drawing table. Just perfect for her..... she is a real drawing freak.

You can see the a part of the great Spa in the background here. The amazing woman there in the foreground is truly admirable for accepting moody me and my swings.

Another view of the spa...   looks nice... huh?

Well... I couldnt let go of that thought...

So we decided to move from Otherland to Fruit islands when we found the perfect place out there...  ;o)
So perfect, no lag, lots of prims, great sailing, beautiful surroundings and some really wonderful people. I even met some people I knew when I lived in the New England sims out in Nantucket, back in the "old days". It seems people are moving from Nantucket to Fruit island....

This is what our islands looked like we we found them. Totally empty without any vegetation but lying in just the perfect place.

The islands needed almost no terraforming so the minor adjustments was done rather swiftly and then we can concentrate and what we would like the place out there to be like. Even if we have the palace in the sky we need a small house done here and the proper vegetation for all the animals and birds...

Here the terraforming is done and we just have the big yacht there for sailing around among those beautiful waters and participation in all the amazing events out there.

We will move out there rather gradual as we still have the old place in Otherland and need to figure out how to plan things. There we have three different layers in the sky. The oriental palace, the photo studio in a Holodeck and the building place and Xstreet shop. Maybe there is a better way to organize all that... ;-)

Exploring Fruit Island

Fruit islands is an amazing part of the sailing world in SL

This amazing tropical world consists of more than 70 connected sims. There is over 250 islands for rent and as they are rather small there is lots of free water for sailing.

Fruit islands is one of the communities that arranges the big regattas in SL and as the sim crossing often are quite smooth, it is really perfect for sailing or flying out there.

But besides all that residential areas there is also more than 30 public open places that are just waiting for exploration.

Below this wonderful lighthouse a beautiful under water world unfolds. Take the sub there if you get tired of all the swimming because the reef is enormous and continues over several sims.

So many places to explore in this amazing creation. This is from one of the secret cave, with fishing Herons and all. I just love it!

But beware of the traps if you bring your beloved like I did....   ;-)

At least if your loved one are as playful as mine is......  LOL

HiQ photography in SL, Part 5: Environment settings

In the three earlier parts I have tried to describe the things in a photo you can affect with settings in the SL client or in the afterwork in Photoshop. But sometimes you can also change the condition for a photo to make it look better.

1. The aspect, view of angle, composition are traditional photographic subjects that you can read about in any book or web site about photography. I will in a later post try to spread some lights over the SL specific things here.

2. Environment, lightning and so on. There are two different aspects to this. First you can add artificial lightning with lamps and other lightsources in world. The next post will cover that and some neat tools for making better portraits.

But now i will try to show how you can affect a photo by using the environment editor i the SL client. Have a look at the photo below:

It is a nice photo of an octopus from the great underwater world in the Fruit sims. However you cant se much of the surroundings because of the light of that time of SL day. That is an easy fix..  ;-).

Just bring up the environment editor in your SL client. Use the World menu -> Environment -> Environment editor, and you get the little windows in the top of these images.

The top left slider just changes the time of day. Just try to drag it and adjust so you get the right color and direction of light. In this example I also changed the Water fog slider to the lower right side of the window and the Water color. Just experiment until you get the right impression for your purpose.

First steps in scripting....

I started out a few weeks ago to learn about scripting. I am an experienced programmer in RL even if it was a few years ago since i did any major work. I have experience with C, C++, PHP and so on so i guess that makes the understanding a bit more easy. But LSL works a bit different and I had some problems getting the hang of it until i found some great resources. That is why I thought somebody else might be interested in them.

First of all:

This is the College of scripting, music and science.... the best starting point for learning about scripting. They have the walls full of very pedagogic and instructive screens. Look at this for example:

 

Be prepared that the center is huge with many floors.... Marlia bought one of the books there and has rezzed it on our building platform for easy refeerence when we are experimenting, building and scripting. So nice of her...   ;-)

I also found a few places with free and open scripts. For me it as been useful to try those scripts, try to understand them an maybe use them as a starting point for my own creations.

Free script library is maybe the best place to try.

But SL free script library is also useful. Some of the scripts are the same but some are unique.

Lastly I bought a PDF-book on Xstreet to read on all my travels. Here you find some info about it:

Introduction to Linden Scripting Language for Second Life

HiQ photography in SL, Part 3: Edit in Photoshop

If you have read part 1 and 2 and then done some experimentation you do now have a lot of photos in your snapshot folder. If you followed my advise you have selected a few golden ones of them and move those to the folder named selected. For this workshop I will use one of my images from The lost garden of Apollo and first I will use Photoshop CS3 for demonstrating the workflow. But Photoshop is very expensive so I will soon show how all this can be done in the Open Source (and free of cost) tool called The Gimp.

1. Open the file in photoshop.

2. Never make a photo bigger without special tools for that, because it will degrade horrible. There are plugins for Photoshot to do that because it needs to interpolate the new pixels, but these tools are rather expensive. So best is only to keep pictures at the original size or to make them smaller.

3. Start with crop. Hold down the shift-key and drag with the mouse to get an even square if you plan to post at flickr, because square photos looks best there.

If you plan to use them in your profile... have a look at this page for details: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Limits

Look under Textures for the correct proportions for picks and profile. There is video for showing how to do that in photoshop. Look at the video a bit down on that page.

4. Set the levels if the importent part are too dark. Ctrl-L (CMD-L on Mac) opens the Levels tool. Often there is no info staples at the rightmost part like in this image. The photo is badly exposed in photo language. If so drag the rightmost handle to the left until it touches the staples of black.

 

I hope you see the difference between those two images. I happens quite often that SL photos gets this way and are wrongly exposed in my opinion. Now you know the trick to fix that...  ;-)

Sometimes you have staples to the right but it still looks to dark, then you can try to move the middle handle to get it to look right.

5. I think it is almost always necessary to increase saturation in the images from SL.
Ctrl-U (CMD-U on the Mac) opens the Saturation tool. For me it is often +15 increase or so.

As you see I have a Swedish version of Photoshop, but I think you will be able to find the right spot in your version of Photoshop despite that.

6. Make the final size. I normally choose 800 pixel at the longest size, that works good on Flickr and blog sites. If it is already smaller then that's so... just leave it. Never make a photo bigger without special tools. Use the shortcuts CMD-ALT-S on Mac (I think it is Ctrl-alt-S on PC).

Now be sure that the link tool (marked by the arrow here) is turned on so that the proportions dont gets changed. Then enter 800 in the field with the highest number).

7. Sharpen it. This is always the final step and must be done after the photo is in its final size. I have a plugin for this. It is called Photokit sharpener but it is a bit expensive. For my RL photos i need this but for SL the built-in unsharp mask is good enough.

Settings: Amount=300 - 400 (if you get white borders like sugar crust at hight contrast areas, then lower to 300),  Radius= 0,3, Treshold= 0...... thats it

8. Save as: PNG (Only use JPG if you have to make them smaller).

Voila! You are done....

Portraits is one of my favourite things...

Well you know by now that I like taking photos in SL. The natural creations of landscapes, water, birds and flowers are one of my main objects, but I cant deny that portraits is a real passion too.

Marlia is my favourite model of course... it is impossible to fail with a portrait of her. In an upcoming post here I will try to explain how I take a photo like this, what inworld tools I have used and how I did the after work in Photoshop on this portrait of this amazingly beautiful woman. I am so happy she choose to be with me here!

But I also want to show some other portraits I have done in the past, as we plan to open a photo studio and do portraits as a job in SL. Both Marlia and I like this very much but it is just for fun and learning about that kind of things too  ;-)

You can also see in this series of photos that my techniques has improved during these months.
The newest photos on top and then they get older further down the page.

If you want me to take your portrait just contact me inworld and I will be happy to try my best....

 

 

HiQ photography in SL, Part 2: File formats and saving

In part 1 we looked at the settings in the client for getting the highest possible quality of the photos. Now we have to get them on the harddrive for further work. I take my photos using the shortcut shift-cmd-S on my Mac. On the PC you will use the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-S. Look in the image below how to set the default settings in the menu for what will happend when you take a new snapshot using this shortcuts.

The important part is in the red ring in the top "Save to your harddrive". Click on the down arrow to the right of the Save button and then click on the "Save as" button (marked with the lower red ring in the image above).

Here you want to select a unique folder for your SL snapshots. Believe or not but my folders are named Images -> SL -> Snapshots  and here all my photos will end up when I take them. The important part here is to use a non-destructive non-compression format. OK your files will be bigger but so much better so DON'T USE JPG's. I have to stress how important this is for the quality of your photos as if you import then in Photoshop or the Gimp for example, edit them, and save them back in JPG the will be compressed (and partly destroyed) first when you save them form SL, then a second time when you save them from Photoshop or The Gimp, and lastly a third time when you upload them to SL, Flickr or your Blog. Every compression to jpg destroys your photo a little bit, how much is depending on the compression settings. So don't use a destructive compression format until the last action in your workflow. I prefer to use the png format. In the image below you can see this settings in the red ring.

You will probably think these files are a bit big, especially if you take lots of snapshots inworld. I am a photographer in RL too so I have the habit to take huge amount of photos. In RL they are in RAW format (huge) and in SL they are in png format (a lot bigger than jpg's). So the important thing here is to be decisive and select the few really great ones and be cold hearted enough to erase all the others. When I have done a photo session I move the few good ones to a folder named Selected and then erase all others in the Snapshot folder.

HiQ photography in SL, Part 1: Settings in SL

I have been posting my in world photos on Flickr for quite some time now. I have received a few questions about how I get the quality that my photos show, so I will share my settings and workflow in a few posts here. Hopefully it can be of some help for somebody out there struggling with this.

Most of the knowledge about the in world settings in the client can be found in Torley Lindens superb article on the Wiki  and in his instruction videos also on the Wiki.  (search for advanced snapshot)

This first post on the subject will show how to do the settings in the client inworld and I will later post about how I treat the photos before posting them.

Below you will find some snapshots on how to do the settings in the client. Dont worry if my screen looks a little bit different than yours. I am using the Emerald client instead of Linden labs default client, mainly because I really like the short command in it like "gth 701" = go to hight 701 meters or "tph" = teleport home.

1. Enable the advanced menu if you have not done so already.
Press Ctrl-Alt-D on PC or Opt-Ctrl-D on Mac.

2.  Turn on high resolution snapshot in the advanced menu (see image above). This saves the photos with 4 times higher resolution to your computer and gives you a lot more headroom for crop, sharpening and other adjustments in The Gimp or Photoshop for example

3. Open the graphics tab in the Preferences and set graphics settings to max (if your computer can handle it). See the red ring in the upper part in the image below. If you have problems with this try to lower the max drawing distance to lets say 128 meters. I normally use a Macbook Air and I can only use these setting in low lag Sims or when I have rezzed completely.

4. Change the hardware settings. In the image above you see a red ring in the lower part of the image. Click on the Hardware settings button to open the window below. Click in the Anistropic Filtering and change the Antialiasing to 16 times. Both these settings gives less jagged images and smother drawing at a distance. On my computer I can use these setting all the time in very low lag Sims, but normally i have to switch them on when I am about to take photos.

I have some very vague plans to implement a quick switch setting for these setting in my very own version of the Emerald or Slowglobe clients.... well the future will tell if that ever happend  ;-)