Some Hints on Taking Pictures in Second Life

(Updated July 2009)

Today I’d like to write about a practical aspect in SL that many people seem to have some difficulty with – taking pictures. While getting a snapshot is a breeze, getting it to look really good presents some challenges. The areas where many SL photographs fall short of the desired result are camera position, resolution / image quality, lighting and aspect ratio. Here are a few hints that will help you overcome the most common difficulties in these areas.

Camera Position

The first requirement of a good photo is that it should show what it’s supposed to show. To achieve that, you have to know how to move your camera. There are essentially two ways to do that.

The first method is to move your mouse cursor on the desired subject of your pic, press and hold the Alt key (the mouse cursor turns into a magnifying glass), press and hold the left mouse button and move the mouse. You’ll notice that you can easily dolly your camera around the selected object or avatar that way, as well as zooming in and out.

By additionally pressing and holding the Ctrl key, you can also tilt the camera angle up and down.

This gives you a lot of freedom to place your camera at exactly the right spot, always keeping your subject in the center of the frame. (If it doesn’t seem possible to select the object you want to focus on, the cause might be an invisible object between you and it that receives the focus instead. Try approaching your subject from a different angle.)

The second method is a little control box called Camera Controls, which you can access from the View menu. It consists of 2 circular controls and a control bar between them. After focusing on an object (Alt + Left mouse button), the left control moves the camera in a horizontal or vertical circle around the object. The right control pans the camera in a straight horizontal or vertical line. And the bar in the middle zooms in and out.

Try which of these methods suits you better. It might be that you’ll use one of them for some kinds of motifs and the other for other kinds.

For both, it can be helpful to get rid of the default camera constraints. You do that via the Advanced menu (press Ctrl-Alt-D if you don’t see it; it will appear next to Help in the top menu bar): Advanced – Disable Camera Constraints.

Hitting Ctrl-0 once or several times is a great way to zoom into a close-up. After using it, Ctrl-9 will reset your view. (Ctrl-8 does the opposite of Ctrl-0).

And now for a trick I’ve learned only recently and which is a HUGE help, especially when you want to shoot a pic of a moving object or avatar – dancing avatars for example. If you’ve ever tried it, you know how hard it is to get both the right moment and the right camera angle for that perfect shot you’re aiming for. Well, did you ever notice that Freeze frame option on the snapshot dialog? It gives you a full size preview of your photo instead of the little thumbnail on the dialog window. And here it comes: you can move your camera AFTER you’ve freezed the preview! That means you can just hit “Snapshot” at the right moment and then take all the time in the world to place your camera exactly where you want it. If you check the “Keep open after saving” option additionally, you can even shoot the same frame several times from different angles. I recommend checking “Auto-refresh” too, as it is all too easy to forget hitting the Refresh button in the heat of battle. Try it out, it makes a world of difference!

Resolution / Image Quality

It goes without saying that if you want to make good pictures, you should use the highest graphics quality your system can handle. Even if you usually use a lower setting for moving about, it’s worth pulling the slider as high as possible when shooting photos. After all, you don’t need a great frame rate for a good still picture!

While you’re in your graphics preferences, take a look at the “Hardware Options” button, too. Here are some often overlooked settings that make a huge difference for the image quality. Especially Anti-aliasing (16x if possible) is essential. Anisotropic Filtering is very useful too. Rule of thumb for shooting photos: If it doesn’t make you crash, use it.

Another important step to enhance the quality of your shots is to save your pictures at a higher resolution. Use the dropdown menu under “Size” in the snapshot dialog to specify your resolution. If you use “File – Snapshot to Disk” or Ctrl-` to shoot a pic, checking the “High-res Snapshot” option (again in the Advanced menu) will make sure that your snapshot is saved at double resolution.

Lighting

Lighting for photography is an art form in itself, so only a few very basic things can be said about it here. Of course you want your picture to be light enough to be able to see what’s in it. Most people try to achieve that by just forcing the sun (World – Force Sun) to noon.

While this will surely fill the scene with plenty of light, however, it doesn’t always yield the desired result. For example, when you’re trying to make a portrait of an avatar, it might be that the noon setting leaves the avatar’s face in relative shadow. In that case, you might be better off with the “Sunrise” or the “Sunset” setting under “Force Sun”. (Or with turning the avatar’s face toward the sun if that is an option.)

If this doesn’t get you what you want (for example when you want to take a picture in a nighttime setting), you have to use artificial lighting.

For that to work, the “Nearby local lights” option in the Graphics tab in your preferences has to be enabled. (Checking that will possibly be all you need to do to solve your lighting problem as local lights are already present in many places.)

Making a light source is easy peasy Japanese. Just create an object, go to the Features tab in the edit window and check the Light option. Play around with the light object’s position relative to your subject and the light colour, intensity, radius and falloff until you get the look you want. You will see that it is possible to create some really artsy effects that way. If you get adventurous, experiment with more than one light source in different colours.

Aspect Ratio

This is a point where the SL developers have gone out of their way to confuse us, with gratifying results. So let’s screw our heads on tightly for a moment and see if we can find a path through the thicket. If you don’t panic, it’s not so difficult after all, promise.

First of all, what is aspect ratio? Quite simply, it’s the relative length of the sides of a picture, mathematically expressed as a division. For example, in a square picture the width is the same as the height, so its aspect ratio is 1:1. A conventional computer or tv screen is one third wider than it is high, so its aspect ratio is 4:3. Modern widescreen TV screens are still wider in relation to their height; they have an aspect ratio of 16:9.

With me so far? Good. Now imagine you have a 4:3 picture and change it’s aspect ratio to 1:1. That’s as if you were putting the picture sideways into a vice and squeezing it. Of course, everything in the picture – faces, bodies, objects – is getting squeezed, too. Hence all those pictures you see in SL of people looking much thinner than they are.

Or you have a 4:3 picture and turn it into a 16:9 picture. In this case, you put it vertically into the vice and squeeze, so the result is that everything looks flattened as if run over by a steamroller.

Now you may ask, why should I want to change a picture’s aspect ratio in the first place? If I leave it just as it is, I won’t have a problem, right? Wrong, because this is where the built-in SL confusion comes in. I shouldn’t complain, as it used to be a lot more confusing than it is now, but it’s still all too easy for a beginner to end up with a horribly distorted picture.

This confusion results from the fact that in SL we are constantly forced to change the aspect ratio of our pictures without even being asked.

It starts with the three main options you’re presented with when you open your Snapshot dialog. You can send your picture via email, save the snapshot to your inventory or save it to your hard drive. Sending via email and saving to your hard drive will work fine. What you will get is a picture with the same dimensions as your screen, minus the user interface parts. If you try saving the picture to your inventory, though, the fun begins.

The reason is  a peculiarity both with pictures you upload from your hard drive to SL and with snapshots you save directly to your inventory, namely that SL will change their aspect ratio. Whenever you upload a picture to SL, its dimensions will be rounded up or off to the closest power of 2. So if you try to upload a picture with an original size of 1024×768 (aspect ratio 4:3), for example, SL will accept the 1024, which is a power of 2, but it won’t like the 768, which is not. What you will end up with is a picture of the size 1024×512 which will be noticeably vertically squeezed.

A similar thing will happen when you save a snapshot to your inventory. The difference here is that in addition to having its sides resized to powers of 2, a snapshot saved to inventory will always be square. Now I’m willing to bet my entire inventory that your screen isn’t square. So what you will get is a square picture that looks noticeably horizontally squeezed if you have a 4:3 screen or ridiculously distorted if you have a 16:9 screen.

Of course, if you’re planning to put your picture on a prim in SL, you can correct the aspect ratio. Just make sure that the dimensions of your prim have the same proportions as those of your original picture.

If you just want the picture in your inventory though to look at it there and share it with others, you should change the original size. The option for that is hidden by default and will only appear when you click the “More>>” button in the Snapshot dialog. There you’ll find a drop-down menu for your picture size. The default setting is “Current window”. The drop-down list offers you several square formats and a Custom option. Make sure you specify a square format when saving to inventory, and you’ll end up with a correct aspect ratio. When you prepare a picture or texture in your graphics program to upload to SL, make sure you use powers of 2 as its dimensions so SL won’t mess it up when you upload it.

Still with me? Excellent! For SL has one more hurdle of confusion for us to take.

One of the most common uses for snapshots is your profile. And guess what? For the different tabs in your profile, you need not one, not two, but THREE DIFFERENT ASPECT RATIOS!

I kid you not. The picture frames on the 2nd Life and Classifieds tabs are roughly 4:3, the one on the Picks tab roughly 16:9, and the one on the 1st Life tab 1:1.

As you know by now, the only one of these formats at which you could save a snapshot to your inventory without distortion is the 1:1, and that is precisely the tab where, by definition, a snapshot from within SL is no use at all. They really have thought this through, those Lindens!

So how do you get pics for your profile without (too much) distortion?

Generally, you have two options: Either save the pictures to your hard drive first, edit them in your graphics program, then upload them back to SL, or do it all within SL by selecting the Custom option for the size and putting in the right numbers.

The thing to remember here is that the pictures should be small, because the frames are small, so large pictures would only make your profile unnecessarily slow to load.

First, option one: you edit the pics in your graphics program. In this case, either specify a custom size with the correct aspect ratio when you shoot the pic, or crop it to the correct aspect ratio in your software. Then, resize them to 256×256 (2nd Life and Classifieds), 512×256 (Picks) or 128×128 (1st Life) and upload them. They will look square and distorted, but they will look correct as soon as you put them in their frames in your profile.

Option two: you do it all within SL. In this case, select “Custom” when you shoot the pics and specify the following dimensions: 320×240 for the 2nd Life and Classifieds tabs, 512×288 for the Picks tab. Again, the resulting pictures will be square and distorted, but will look right in their frames. If you want to use an SL picture on your 1st Life tab after all, 128×128 will do for that one.

Phew! That was a hard piece of work. You’ve earned yourself a cuppa and a nice dance and chat at the Shelter now. Hope this helps you to get great pictures of your Second Life from now on. If you get stuck, just ask!

Appendix:
A Note on Widescreen Monitors

Okay, I got myself a widescreen monitor now, and I noticed something that’s rather annoying and bears mentioning here. On a 16:9 screen, SL doesn’t give you a real 16:9 image but does the same thing that widescreen tv sets do when they have to display a 4:3 image and fill the whole screen with it instead of leaving black bars at the sides. It’s sometimes called “Smart Zoom” or something in that vein. The 4:3 image is stretched horizontally, but not uniformly, but the stretching gets more pronounced toward the left and right side, so that the middle of the image stays relatively distortion-free, while the distortion gets almost unbearably obvious toward the edges. No use at all for photography. That’s why I’ve decided to specify a 4:3 format like 1600×1200 when I save pictures to my hard drive instead of using the Current window setting.

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