Taking photos

Seriously, how do you do it now? I can't make head or tail of that new interface. I'm about ready to give up on photos.

Well, I wait till the person turns around. Then I grab his photos, and run.

It seems that we are now charged $L10 for taking a photo for our inventory.

Ah, only SL residents level 5 may understand and use the new photo interface.

Go back to farming money trees and begging for handouts, you'll eventually level up.

Then, you too can have the power of FLASH-SCREENSHOT!

It's always been like that. o_O

Your joking right...

but a way around that is to get that program where you can screen capture an area.. fudge i forgot hte name.. hold on calling it.... Print Key! not the actual key but the software called print key.. so there sl for being greedy u know whats!!!

You mean if someone else gives us one? That's sucky!

As for taking pictures... ugh! It's harder now than using a 35mm slr, trying to figure out the f-stop and all! First, the flash blinds me into zombie mode, then I just look at this box of options, waiting for heavenly intervention as to what to do. I can appreciate options for resolution, etc. when taking product shots that you're going to upload to your hard drive. But sheesh, for those everyday fun moments I want to capture... it feels hopeless.

I'm a point-n-shoot kinda gal, and I miss the simplicity of the old camera. Please, give us back our Instamatics!

I tried this photo thingy out last nite.. the quality of upload u get for the 10L sucks.. I want my old photo controls back. Pictures use to come out clear and u could see them.. now they r unclear and fuzzy.. I dont like the new controls.. i am a point and click kinda gal to.. dont want to have to mess around with all these gadgets.. LL trying to confuse and already confused person.. lol

OK, my pictures WERE good, and now I am understanding that I have to figure out some way to get them to be not blurry?

a. How do I do that?

b. This explains why they broke a perfectly good system. If there are several choices to pick for not having them blurry, then my guess is that soon they will make the non-blurry ones cost more to upload.

coco

The quality of screenshots is the same. What makes it _look_ blurry is:

* by default, the snapshot of regular size (512x512 or less) is stretched on much larger area of full window your SL client has
* what you see is what the texture will be like after the usual compression is applied.

Just ignore the blurriness, it should look okay after the picture is uploaded/saved to disk ...since when you open it then, the pixels will be of regular size not this stretched-to-fit-screen monstrosity :/

I uploaded the pic to see if it would still look blurry.. i paid the 10L and it still looks blurry to me.. the quality of the pic sucks Still want the old camera controls back

Not to my knowledge it hasn't. And I've taken a lot of photos.

You've ALWAYS paid 10L to upload a photo. Well, at least since Feb '05 when I joined. I don't know what brand of glue you've been sniffing, but fuck, pass it over. Stop hogging it.

ever since i started SL back in 2004. ive had to pay as far as i can remember, but i KNOW that we have had to pay before the update

Same here, always paid when uploading as texture.

In fact, I never bothered with uploading as texture because I was paying 10 $L for a blurry, 256x512 rescaled copy or whatever it used, when I could just snap-to-disk and re-upload it and get more decent resolution.

One thing about the new snapshot stuff is that you can at least specify the texture resolution for upload-as-texture. What I wished it had? Cropping.

Think about it, sometimes we only want to capture just one part of the scene; Our avatar, or some cool looking HUD we're wearing. So if it had the option to drag-and-select and then upload THAT, it would save some of us content creators a bit of time. No need to go outside of SL, crop the picture to cut out our latest necklace or what-have-you to re-upload for a vendor.

Saving to disk is free. Saving to inventory is the same as "File -> Upload Image..." and costs L$10. This cost has been there since my join date.

There are some cures to bluriness depending on how you are saving. If you are uploading you have to make sure the settings are right if you plan on a Photo or Texture. For photos you are not activating the "Keep specified aspect ratio" checkbox. The snapshot will have a slight anti-alias in this mode which will clean up upon viewing it in inventory or from disk.

If your plan is to use your snapshot as a texture be sure to select the "Keep specified aspect ratio" so you can specify a proper texture dimension (512x512, 1024x1024, 1024x512, etc.). This will most likely stay blurry unless you crank up the texture size because you have no control over the framing of the texture. For example, a 512x512 texture on my 1400x994 display looks pretty muddy as you are seeing what a 1x1 texture size of that pic would look like on that much monitor space. There is a lot of power here for making in-world textures though personally I don't know why one would beyond applying the proper aspect ratios to certain dialog images (your profile image, your picks, etc.)

As long as Linden Lab added the UI scale feature to preferences (something I will never use, I need resizable dialogs not this), why not add a Advanced Snapshot Mode checkbox that uses the new interface but is off by default, and the default being the old interface?

when you press the snapshot button, it freezes the world all Matrix style, and you can use the camera controls to get another camera angle on the exact same pose!!

That's cool if you are wanting to capture a static pose, but is insanely annoying if you are trying to capture something in motion.

Prior, I would use the small preview to see if I had captured what I wanted. If not, I kept whacking "new screenshot" until I got it, then saved to disk.

Now, my only choice is to slam the crap out of CTRL-` and then hope for the best. Or just give up on SL's offerings entirely and rely upon FRAPS.

Guys, I understand from all the reports that the image quality has gone down. I'm not at that stage yet. I'm not asking "how do I improve the image quality to what its was?" I am asking "How do i take a picture?" Subtle difference.

Um.

I've not actually taken a picture with the new system... I'd need to log in and play with it to remember what is needed to write a How-To. ^_^

zOMG! I didn't know that. That's *fantastic*. I take everything back I said about this new snapshot system, well apart from maybe some of the things that are crap.

Honestly
ya don't bother any more

just press the snapshot button,
then click save snapshot to hard drive (to keep it from getting blurry)
then adjust the size of the snapshot (1024 by 768, 800 by 600, or current window)
keep aspect ratio will prevent your pic from distortion
then press 'update snapshot'
then press save

p.s. if you just want a quick snapshot just use ctrl+~