Here at Tragicly Styled, I would like to share my knowledge I learned in my four years in SL not just regarding fashion. So I figured I would go ahead and start doing Tutorials. The first one I would like to show is how I do most of my blog images. Currently I am working on a Dell Inspiron laptop and needless to say, it is not a gaming computer. In my everyday slife, I run my graphics at low, anything higher than that and my viewer becomes slow. Also, because this laptop does not have the cool graphic things like shadows and DoF. Not wanting to fall behind, I developed my own editing style. It’s simple and easy and I am going to share it with you.
Step 1.) Step one starts inworld. The first thing I do is find what I call a clear windlight setting. If you look at the picture bellow this, the image on the left is an example of a clear windlight setting. This time I used Nam’s Optimal Skin 1.
The clear image is the base of the image and does not get edited in most cases. Once I have my base image, I skim though other windlight setting until I find one I like. This snapshot I call my highlight and shadows layer. I look for the way the lighting plays on my avatar. For this tutorial I used AnaLutetia – Outside
Step 2.) For step two you need a photo editing program. I use Photoshop cs5. Open both images and holding down shift, drag the Highlights and Shadows image on top of the base image. Shift drag will align the photos up on top of each other.
Step 3/4.) Step three and four is wear the magic happens sort to speak. At the top of the tool bar open the edit menu go to Adjustments and open black and white. A menu will pop up. I play with the color values until I like how it looks. The left image bellow is an example of how the image will look.
After I have the Black and White image I want, the next step is to use brightness and contrast until you get an effect like something above.
Step 5/6.) Step five and six are the easiest steps in this process. With the Highlight and Shadow layer ontop of the base image, set thee layer style to Soft light. This will add highlights and shadows to he base image bellow.
Now if you were just wanting to do a photo, I would say you could call it good and skip down to step seven, but because the image is for a blog post I move to step six and lower the opacity on the highlight and shadows layer so not all the detail is lost.
Step 7.) Flatten the image and fix any lighting lines. Sometimes, depending on the windlight setting you use, the light can leave odd lines around the nose in mouth. Smooth these out using either smudge, blur, clonestamp or content aware.
The image you should have now has highlights and shadows now, you can even use the blur tool and alpha mask to fake a DoF look. Bellow on the left we have our before base image and the right is our after.
I hope you enjoyed my Tutorial and stay tuned to Tragicly Styled for styling credits of the look used in this post.
~Gabe Bookmite <3
Great tutorial, thank you for sharing!
You are welcome.