Picture Editing vs Straight from SL

I thought it might be important to some readers to know how much and what kind of photo editing I do for my pictures on a regular basis.

If I say this is an ARTY picture, then I've probably added shadows, backgrounds and generally tried out some technique or other I found a tutorial. The colors and whatnot may or may not be true to the way the items look in world. I may use brushes as I did on a pile up I did recently to add hair to the image or other things.

Otherwise, I generally do the following things to my blog pictures. It's pretty simple and I hope it doesn't detract too much from the way the image would look in world.

1) I take the pictures in a fairly large size. Not so much because this is what everyone says do as because it gives me the best canvas to work with. Generally it's something like 4500 x 2200... keeping picture aspect ratios constrained etc.

2) The first thing I do is to crop the picture. I may be going to leave as is or add to a composite or something later but in any case I crop the picture. This is mainly to help myself and my photo editing program not having to deal with pixels I'm not interested in every time I save etc.

3) The next thing I do is to remove the green screen or whatever color screen I used. I do this using the select tool and refine edge. There are some great tutorials out there for how to use refine edge, especially for sl even...  I think this one by CelestialHeather on Youtube is the one I used ... now I tend to adjust the feather and edges etc for the picture I'm editing.

4) Even with the refine edge tool, you tend to have some bits of green left over on the image - usually around hair or other semi transparent things. I'm sure I learned how to do this on a tutorial but now I can't find the one I used so... whomever taught me to do this, thank you so much and please point me to your tute so I can credit and link you! Anyhow, the process isn't complicated. I basically select my image (control and click on the layer) so I have the outline or cut out selected. Then I use my eyedropper to select a color near the edge of the parts that are green (BUT NOT THE GREEN PARTS ITSELF) So for example in the case of hair it'd be the hair color, if it was a scarf or a skirt or something it'd be that part of the image.  Using a small and somewhat soft, and somewhat transparent brush on a new layer, I then paint over as carefully as I can just the edges of the hair and the parts that are still partly green. At first all you'll see is just a layer of ugly brown and you'll be thinking omg, Jewel what do you have me doing now! But, once you're done and then go back using the eraser tool if you happened to paint over skin or other parts that you don't want the same color as your hair... after that, change the blending mode of the layer to hue. Immediately you will see that the greenish bits are more like the color of the hair they should be and less like green. I then duplicate the layer, change the blending mode of that layer to saturation. Then do the same thing, duplicating again, changing this blend mode to color. This does a good job of finishing off those pesky green bits.

5) I often use a soften brush to go over areas of the skin to smooth them a little bit. I don't know why sl photos often seem to end up with skin that looks harsh with pores but it always does, even though in world it may not look like that at all. I usually select the skin areas with the magic wand, control clicking til I get all the skin bits and then use a medium sized soft and semi transparent brush setting to run the soften brush over the skin. Once I deselect, I may touch it up a bit more around the eyes. I don't like to go too overboard with the softening because I think then that's misleading the reader as to what the skin looks like. This is also a quick and dirty version of Ryker Beck's much nicer method of softening skin that's shown in her tutorial here. Ryker's method is also the one that Strawberry Singh mentioned that she uses, here.

6) Liquify! Liquify is, in my humble opinion, the greatest helper to sl photo editing, after refine edge that there is. As Katey Coppola mentions in her excellent liquify tutorial - it's as though our avatars are made out of boxes - which is a pretty accurate observation since digital images and avatars, it's not round, it's angles. Which can mean that you end up with some pretty deformed looking bits of an avatar - especially around wrists, elbows and other areas. Square breasts for example, yikes! There are tons of liquify tutorials out there but here's the link to Katey's. So basically I use the liquify filter to make breasts look round, arms look more like arms instead of weird deformed bits and so on. Wrists look like they aren't broken too.

7) Finally I place my image, my avatar cut out so to speak on a background. I've been experimenting with using backgrounds from PNP but you also can just use plain old white, or take your own sl snaps or use a free background etc. I think composite images are often shown best on a plain background so as to not compete with the avatar cut out itself. After all, a reader is usually interested in what the avatar looks like and wearing, NOT the fancy schmancy background. I usually apply a soft shadow around the cut out, mainly because SL shadows don't work that well for me in photographs.

And that's it. I use a simple windlight setting like one from Nam's or AnaLutetia, Luna Jubilee or Strawberry Singh to take my photos and as Gogo mentioned recently, I have my avatar facing north on my pose stand when I start.