Skin Texture matching?

Ok one more area of puzzlement..........

In my new venture of making skins I've manged to plow my way through and turn out some really cool first editions. But I've found one glitch that I cannot work out how to fix.

When creating a new skin.....I grab the templates and begin by editing the base color to a shade darker or lighter that appeals to me. I make the exact same adjustments for each base....head, torso, legs.......so that technically...I 'should' have the exact same result. Right.....haha......wrong LOL

I noticed with one skin (not with all so far) even tho i had made identical shade adjustment to each segment....when I put the final skin together in-world....there is a decidedly noticable difference going from the torso to the head. The head, no matter what i've tried...always looks lighter and more washed out, for lack of a better term.

Is there a trick, or rule of thumb when matching the skin tones? The initial templates, of course, match perfect...so my thought was that making the same changes to each section, would keep them matched. But, it seems not to be the case. So....any advice you guys can pass on would be mucho appreciated~!!! I've got it down....just have to get past this one persnickity issue.

Try this - make a new layer, fill it with a colour (preferably something that resembles a skin tone). Change the mode of the layer to overlay, multiply, soft light etc and play with the opacity until the skin underneath is the tone you want. Duplicate the fill layer to the other skin files. Tones should then match up perfectly.

Ah, good thought Stephanie! I was not thinking outside the box enough~! I'll try it!

Just to follow up on this one....I did exactly that......and the head was still too light.....so I ended having to adjust the tone twice before I got a match. I'm wondering if has something to do with how the texture is distributed over the head.....as opposed to the rest of the body. I cannot figure why it wouldn't match.......but what a pain in the a$$ LOL

The overlay certainly helped make the torso and legs run together smoothly.....but man the head is a pesky little bugger LOL

There is no reason for the head and torso to render differently across seams within SL unless you are looking at other common discrepancies such as pixel stretch or render lag (blurring) in non-uniform textures (which is what skin and clothing textures are). Any time you work with a non-uniform texture you introduce the possibility that pixel noise will reveal seams. Sometimes a darker skin will reveal more flaws than a lighter version of the same skin, especially if the only difference between the skins are a Level/Curve/Brightness/Contrast adjustment in Photoshop. Skins are very unforgiving when it comes to seams. Even the smallest differences in pixels will pop out at you when up against seams.

Forget about trying to match skin textures for a moment, and fill those texture areas with a completely uniform RGB value (no noise) for both the head and torso. Or better yet, don't put any textures in those slots at all. Let the default skin show through. If you still encounter the same issue then the matching problem may not be within your textures, but within the rendering of them. Hopefully you can isolate and resolve the issue within your own textures. That means the problem isn't global.

LOL

Well Namssor......the OTHER reason textures wouldn't match, that you failed to bring up.....is if they're uploaded as different file formats! LMAO Doh!

I wasn't able to get the head transparency to work with the tga 32bit file.....I tried saving several different ways...merge only....flatten......re-erase the transparent...I tried everything to get tga to work and it simply would not. So.....I was saving the head texture in a png format.....but still saving the torso and legs as tga!!! That'll do it!!!!

So....this leads me to another question as well......png uploads way lighter and with greater detail then tga......but....the tga maintains a truer color tone (I did dark skins last night and got this beautiful expresso tone.....tga kept it true.....png made it way lighter)

So....I really need to get a handle on this head alpha transparency bit because it's driving me nuts, and I like the over-all look of the skins much better in the tga format.

Um...yes...that'll mess things up . The same thing will happen with mixes of TGA and JPEG, or standard JPEG and conversion from one of those formats to J2C. I ran into a similar problem when previewing skins through the character folder in the client. In my case the client preview processed the image compression a slightly different way and I wound up with a texture noise issue along the edges of a transparent overlay. It took me a few hours to figure out what the heck was going on. It turned out to be a client/server limitation that I could not correct, so I abandoned a really cool idea I had for user erasable skin tattoos.

You've probably already checked it out, but Chosen's dissertation on Alpha Channels is the place to look.

oh...no....I haven't seen that.....where is it? I'll take a look~!!!

Ok...

I read Chosen's thread......and everything in there is all kind of lost to me because PSE 5.0 doesn't even display the way the PSE programs in that tutorial apparently display. The tool bar is slightly different, as is the layers drop down menu......so I find myself jumping thru hoops to figure out how to do the same steps in PSE5. (I also never never use keyboard shortcuts...so when folks start explaining via shortcuts....I have to back up and figure out what the actual mouse click step is....lol....I know, I'm a goof)

But....I also tried Stephanie's advice in creating a new alpha layer.....only without the masking capability....I was at a loss. Worse still, is the existing templates I'm using obviously have the alpha in tact.....and my first uploads to SL were fine. But in working with the different templates......they all seem to be put together slightly different and suddenly my alpha layer was also showing transparency in the eyebrows. I was puzzled because I was doing the exact same thing to create my finished skin.....and suddenly I've got a glitch.

If I could get a precise handle on the way to proceed in PSE5.....then I wouldn't need to worry about how the templates are designed because I'd be able to start from scratch with my own layers. I hope hope there is someone out there who is familiar enough with PSE to guide me here.

I don't know if this helps anyone, but I noticed when using PS CS4 Extended that if I got the message when opening that " this file uses a different color profile.. bla bla bla..." and you choose a different option from one file to another, say checking "use working profile" or "discard color profile info" that would result in the tga uploads having different tones.

I'm not sure what program you're using but does it have the same issue with color profiiles?

Hi Violaine...

I use PSE5.0 and I've never got any kind of color profile messge. But, the matching issue seems to be a matter of maintaining the images in the same file type. After much frustrating with trying to work around the masking issue (alpha layers not being an easy thing to do in PSE5 if one wants to use tga) I decided to go with using png for my uploads to SL.....and all is just fine. I still notice an ever so slight variation but....much of that has to do with the lighting I'm using in SL.

This is sort bringing me to another area of puzzlement because I use windlight settings exclusively and constantly change them. ALL the skins I have in my inventory have some kind of tiny imperfections if I look at them in the right lighting. So it begs the question.....when creating something new.....what are designers using for lighting to check their work in world??? In many light settings, my new skins look about perfect....and then in some settings....all skins look crappy LOL

OK what you need to do there, when you aren't sure if you have a seam or if it's lighting, is put on somebody else's skin. Someone who you know does seamless work. If you see the same "seam" on their skin, it's just lighting. Turn the wrong way in any skin, you are going to have the appearance of a seam so the first thing to do is check other people's before you waste an hour trying to fix a non-existent issue in PS. As for general Windlight settings to check skins, Namssor's are very good.

As we all know, Windlight offers many controls over lighting and color values similar to stage lighting. Some of the more critical ones are gamma, and color shift (like gels for stage lights). Stephanie mentioned the ones I use (created). They are essentially color neutral, gamma neutral settings that preserve (as best as possible) the original color values in avatar textures. I created three different Windlight settings with skins in mind. The reason for that was that prims render differently than avatars. Prims are more sensitive to contrast than avatars, so I have one setting with very low contrast on the avatar to accomodate for prims and another that falls somewhere in the middle, and finally a third that is purely for previewing avatar skins.

Downloads are here:

http://www.secondskinlabs.com/Downloads/downloads3.html

Sorry I couldn't help you with PSE5. It's an application I don't use.

Stephanie.... that's exactly what I did. I put on a bunch of other skins I have from different creators.....that are beautiful. But.....some of the lighting settings are just evil for any skin. LOL And then just yesterday, I discovered the templates I'm working with are NOT matched perfect. I was applying a tint overlay and noticed right away that the torso and bottom were different.....one being slightly more pink.
This drove me nuts so I finally copied the layers on to one new file and lined up the top & bottom to meet as they would on the avatar.....and bingo, when I enlarged it I could see clearly the difference. But, I was also able to fix it by adjusting hue by 1~!!! Now, as they were, the skins looked seamless in-world. But.....tinting the templates made it very obvious they were not matched. So.....my trick of putting the layers together on a single page to check the uniformity seems to work. Once I made the fix, and continued.....they looked fine in-world.

Namssor - I also have a bunch of neutral windlight settings, since I've been doing photography for 2 years in SL......windlight is a great tool. So I've definitely got settings that are devoid of any color wash. Every time i would buy a new skin however, I'd end up tuning to a different pre-set to get the best possible lighting for that 'one'. And I have skins from a bunch of different designers that I love......but they do NOT all look as good in a neutral lighting.

But, that being said.....I guess the most anyone can do is check in the neutral settings and hope the buyers know enough about the environment settings to make the best out of their SL. LOL The more I do, the more confident I'm feeling. And I'm kicking myself for not being brave enough 3 years ago to try this.....as an artist, I'm finding I really really love it!

ok. i'm kind of a slow learner, i guess, but i'd been off working on skins and trying them on WITH A FACELIGHT (ok, ok, mock me now...) and they looked swell and then with no facelight of course they looked like mongo crap, however thanks to the info in these posts I now understand what the heck to do with Windlight to at least create a good environment for assessing the skin overall so all I wanted to say with this ridiculous run-on sentence was...

THANK YOU!!!!

really. Namssor. thank you so much. i'm using your settings now and using your demos to make sure i'm sure i'm sure. and thanks to all who commented and contributed.

Anik