Guide to nice pictures

Today, a short guide how to get a picture taken in SL, with nice results. Such an instruction set can never be complete, and so i encourage everyone to add hints and tips and tricks as comment to this blog post.

The pose
You want reproducable results. So, it is a bad idea to simply let your AO run. Most likely it will loop through various animations. Best is to get a stand or a poseball that you like. If you want to make your own, there are tools for that, in SL, like Animare. (yes i made that :P )

The snapshot function
For the current workshop, i am using a pillow from Pillow talk, that is rezzed at Nayeli.

snapshot button

I am using Viewer 2. From here then the snapshot button which opens the snapshot preview:

Make sure, that you have enabled "Save to my computer" (1)
To see more options, there is a button called "more" (2)
And each time you make changes in this window, the screenshot needs to be refreshed before saving (3)

If you have activated the button "more" the window looks like this:

So, we start out like this:

click to enlarge (this goes for all pictures here in this post)

So you see, pretty much a boring picture. and it is way too big. For profile pictures, blogs and most other options, this size is way too large. So, first what we will do is reduce the picture size. The snapshow preview window has settings for that.

Size: 800 x 600

Result:

Click to enlarge, to see the difference to the first picture

This picutre is smaller, but still, somehow boring.

Simple math
A common way to drag attention of the eye more to the picture, is the 3/3rd way. We will now cut the picture into three imaginary pieces, in length. Then the main motive should rest on the axis between 2nd and 3rd part.

These lines have been added manually, they are not part of the SL snapshot option

The same without these helping lines:

To get your camera aligned properly, Second Life offers a panel in the viewer:

Another example:

Wrong, because the person is in the center.

Here now again 2/3rd rule applied

And the result

So far, so.. ok. Not good yet. Next stop:
Light
It depends what you want to picture. For any kind of face photography, straight light onto the face is bad. The profile of a face is what makes it unique. Now, how can one change light?
There are two ways:
The fast way is via the menu:

We have preset: Sunrise, Midday, Sunset and Midnight. All the previous pictures have been taken with "Midday". Now here the results with the three others:

Sunrise

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Sunset

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Midnight

You see, three times the exact same picture, only light varies. But there is more...

Menu World - Sun - Environment Editor opens...

The Environment editor, and here we go to "Advanced Sky". Then we find "Sky Presets" (red circle)
Play with these, but also have a look there then at Lightning, Sun/Moon Position.

The following video shows it:

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