Hints on Taking Pictures in SL

Hi, I just put up a hopefully helpful writeup on the ins and outs of taking pictures in SL on my blog (http://drickenbacker.wordpress.com/). If you've been wondering why your snapshots look weird, you'll probably find some clues there. Enjoy!

Dylan, that's a wonderful explanation of SL's confused and confusing Snapshot feature. I'm printing it for my scrapbook.

Thank you for this! I take horrible pictures.

thanks for the excellent tips, i try and take good snapshots but a lot of the time they come out bad!

i will be saving this and using for future reference

Well done, a very clear and useful explaination of how we can now get decent pics into and out of SL.

To get the 4:3 resolution, you could run your screen at 800x600. That works mathematically.

Alternatively, use something like HyperCam that allows you to select a region directly on the screen, and save that to HD intact... I then use a balck or white background at the SL required format/size, and overlay my intended pic onto that. It will then always remain intact when uploaded and gives me a 'baseboard/canvas' to align the overlay up with.

Also selecting Bumpmap and Shiny from the preferences, will add more depth to your screen shots . If you use a solid coloured background (netural to the subject) you can remove this and apply the subject matter to a slightly defocused background to create depth of feild. Something I do regularily in our movies.

With local lighting enables, there are many forms of facial lighting that you can deploy, one of the best I've seen is called Radiance and is sold by Marzipan, this applies soft lighting to the face areas of the avatar, as the SL lighting is a bit harsh. Having the model facing south when shooting, and using sunset/sunrise can create a more 3d effect. Noon lighting creates a flat look, with downcasting shadows, giving the subject bags under the eyes and lips/nose.

Noon is ghastly .. and to be avoided at all costs!
It's almost permanently sunset at Bagg End