is it me or my g-card lol

Ok....question regarding snapshots and saving to hard drive.

I have been doing photos for nearly 2 years in SL....and I've progressed pretty well as far as learning what works and what doesn't. My g-card is nVidia8800 and I keep my settings at ultra with no real problems. I save my snaps in a jpg format...usually at around 2012x918 or something.....

But.....I noticed 2 things..... often when I take a snap the screen image will sort of blur temporarily as the image is being captured.....I usually re-do it, just in case it saved weird and thus far I haven't had a problem.... But.....is that a common little glitchypoo I'm seeing or perhaps a setting I need to adjust.....or my g-card going wonky. (it better not be, I just got it in July and haven't been in SL enough to burn it out lol)

Second.....after saving a close up head shot.....I noticed when I pulled it up to edit in PS that the details around the nose.....where the texture would be shaded on the sides of the nostrils......looked quite blocky. Also noticed that with the hands shading if the shot was an extreme close up. I have taken shots, and then cropped for a head shot...and never noticed the choppy shading.....so was I just too close with the cam? Also, it wasn't the skin....I tried a few skins and ctrl/0 on the face.....noticed the shading near the nose being blocky with any skin....no matter how perfect it looked from a distance)

I've either never noticed this before....because it wasn't there.....or because it's normal and I just never took a shot that close at such a high res. Any thoughts???
Also...would I be better off saving my snaps as bmp files?
thanks

(ps. I see soooo many close ups by folks that seem to have totally perfect smooth shading on the face....are they just photoshopping like crazy??)

Use PNG instead.

Also, turn on anti-aliasing in the graphics preferences hardware options. That'll take care of the jagged edges.

hehe thanks~!!! I guess because I only recently upped my file size to over 2000....I hadn't ever noticed the blockiness......so much to learn! I will do both, thank you!

hmm...anti-aliasing was already off..... it looks like this is just how the shape is rendered..... I'mm have to keep experimenting.

Turn anti-aliasing ON -- setting it to anywhere from 4x to 32x depending on what your system can handle.

LMAO....clearly I did NOT get enough sleep last night Teach me to watch an entire disc of battleStar galactiga episodes (it was my finace's fault lol)

ok....got it...I'm going in for a re-shoot lol


OMG...totally black screen when I did that LOL So...I tried setting it to 2x....and it shut SL down completely....um....riiiight.....now what lol

Rather then use AA, take high rez snapshots, then shrink them down when you are done editing them (this is esentualy AA)

The reason for this is AA blurs colors together on the edges of objects, this can be bad if you ever want to use editing techneques, or filters, that require a hard edge.
Also if you ever want to resize your snapshot, it is better to start with an image not affeted by AA or else you get a reduction in quality.

Plus in my opinion, simulating AA by reducing a high res image in photoshop looks better :3

Oh, and for that, change it while on the log in screen. not after logging in.

Thanks Dante.....

As it turns out it wasn't the AA that crashed me...it was just a bad moment.....I went on again later and took some snaps....I left AA on at 4x and used high res......the images actually came out beautiful and I saved them as PNG's. I did some cropping and down-sizing which is normally how I edit.....and I only use very basic filters to get the effects I want (I try to let the images speak for themselves without a lot of PS'ing)

Anywho....as always you guys were a lot of help and now that I am more informed...I can adjust my photo shooting techniques according to need. Thanks gang.