Large photo without distortion?

I'm taking product photographs and am trying to get as large an image as possible so the resolution is crisp, and things like cylinder prims don't lose their shape. But yet I don't want to zoom in too close because there is a lot of perspective distortion, as a a wide angle lens would produce.

Any ideas for increasing resolution and size without zooming in close?

There is an option for "Hi-res snapshot" in the Debug menu - I don't remember what the resolution is, but the resulting snapshots (on disk) are really huge. Also, have SL run in full-screen when taking the snapshot.

Milo, there is also a true optical zoom feature that many folks don't know about. Ctrl-8 zooms out, and Ctrl-0 zooms in. Ctrl-9 will restore your view to the default setting.

One of my faves.

All good suggestions so far, but also don't forget about anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing. Anisotropic filtering will prevent textures from blurring when they're at oblique angles. It's usually turned off by default on most machines. You can turn it on in prefereces.

Anti-aliasing will prevent jagged edges, and help objects and textures appear to retain their shapes better at all camera angles and distances. It is a little more complicated to set up properly though since there's no control for it inside SL, unfortunately. You can only turn it on through your graphics card settings. If you've got your card's AA setting on "aplication controled", which most people do, for SL that means no AA whatsoever. Use your card's control panel to turn AA on globally and then restart SL. The higher AA the setting, the better SL will look, but the slower it will run. Also, global AA overrides like this are not good for most applications since, unlike SL, most apps have their own individual AA settings (pretty rediculous that a graphics-intensive 3D program like SL doesn't, but that's just how it is). It's best to turn AA on, take your pictures, and then turn it off again.

This is surprisingly little-known. There should be an easier way to enable this within SL's own Preferences, as it makes a YUGE difference. I remember the day I turned on 2xQ antialiasing, and even with the blurring and performance hit, I was likee WOWOW.

I had the same experience the first time I saw SL with AA turned on. I was over at one of my RL/SL friends' houses, and he had SL on when I got there. I took one look at his screen, and I was like "Dude, how come everything on your screen looks so much better than on mine?" I was especially curious since his hardware pales in comparison to mine.

His response was, "Guess what resolution this is at? 800 x 600!"

Now I was really floored. Mine was at 1280x1024, almost double the resolution of his, but his looked a thousand times better and more real. He went on to explain that all he did was turn on 8x anti-aliasing, and that made all the difference. I was really amazed.

Then when I got home, my amazement turned to frustration with LL when I quickly realized SL has no built in AA support of its own whatsoever. Since I almost always run SL and Photoshop at the same time (dual monitors), turning on AA globally is not a good option for me. Having Photoshop anti-aliased by the video card is not a good idea, ever.

Even worse, I explained the story in the hotline and asked if there were any plans to include AA controls in SL preferences, and the post went completely ignored. A simple yes or no would have been nice. Come on, LL, this is something that is really needed if SL is ever to compete visually with even the most basic video games, and if you ever want gamers to stop referring to SL as "cartoony". Okay, I know, SL's not a game. Well, pretty much every graphics intensive program has had internal AA for well over a decade. So what's the problem?

Perfect! That's what I needed, a telephoto effect but high detail. The high-res would have worked too, and I might do a combination of both when I need that level of detail.

I bet the anti-aliasing option would look good Chosen, but my built-in video card on my Powerbook doesn't have its own control panel.

Thanks for the ideas!

Gosh, that speaks volumes to me... the sheer beauty of AA...

OKEYDOKE THIS GOES ON MY NUDGELIST!!!

Infact, I'll be bold enough to declare that being able to increase AntiAliasing for SL is one of the BEST-KEPT SECRETS.

Chosen, two points - turning antialiansing on globally should only affect 3D accelerated display regions, and I don't think Photoshop uses that. At least I didn't see any difference in PS with and without global AA. But even if, you should be able to turn AA on only for second life:

If you have a nvidia card, go to the display properties and look for Performance&Quality section in nvidia tab. Add a new profile, name it 'second life', add the SL exe to the list of programs (using browse) and then associate the profile with the SL exe by checking the checkbox. Now, in the profile, change your settings to whatever you want. The UI is a bit retarded here, because you have to hit OK to save your changes, but that will also set the active profile to 'second life'. So go back to the same place and put active profile back to global settings.

Now, start SL and if you activated manual AA in the profile, you'll have SL with AA, even in windowed mode. I don't use it because it will antialias the text as well, and I don't like blurry text. It should be possible to do something similar with ati cards.

EDIT: I'm talking about pc/win machines here. I have no idea how to do it on a mac.

Any clues on how to do this in Mac OS-X? or is it just on by default? I know the UI in OS-X always looks twice as crisp as Windows does.

I think you are right, Candide. Hardware aliasing for the nvidia cards only applies to Direct3D or OpenGL regions.
As far as I know, only Matrox has hardware aliasing for text and fonts, similar to the software based ClearType in Windows. This first appeared on their Parhelia cards. Also partly a reason why I still stear clear from LCD monitors, because text looks terrible on LCDs without some form of aliasing.

Gosh, I wish I did. Sowwy, I don't, but hopefully someone who does will post. And yes--OS X has font antialiasing on and a lot of other nice stuff enabled by default. It took me awhile to find out about Microsoft ClearType.

OS X or even OS9 for that matter, has lots of funky things going on in the background that it doesn't tell you about. I found out one of the reasons, at one point, why the OS looks so juicy and alive.

Something in it automatically applies extra contrast to everything!

I've had all sorts of problems because of this, ranging from misjudging the contrast in photoshop, to dull printing because of the misjudgement and even projectors problems which was uncorrectable (projectors tend to be set on the contrasty side by default).

Nice trick, App]e.