Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Snippy About Glow in Snaps

Since I can't complain about a bug that I created in Second Life pictures (as shown in the last two posts), I have to fall back on an oldie but a goodie: Astigmatic Glow. For some time now, even before viewer 2.x was released if I recall correctly, I've had to put up with the glow in prims smearing like the viewer's "camera" has an astigmatism. Several examples can be seen throughout my blog, like this one from my post about the SL7B Time Capsule. The red ball in that pic has a glow to the left of it and you can see other faint examples in the same pic.

Can you spot it in this one? Look at the white flowers on the right in particular. The maker set them to Glow and the astigmatism has spread the glow toward the left and onto the rock. Same for the yellow/orange flowers and the rune on the rock ... a definite smear to toward the left. For this picture, the effect isn't that noticeable and not much of a detraction. If I were to add some blur to emphasize the subject then the whole point would be moot.

If you aren't sure whether you see it or not, here is a screen cap (cropped to fit roughly the same view). Disregard the outline on my wings, please, and the HUDs ... I didn't do anything to hide them (to freeze my avie in a pose I Edit a prim and that locks the animation so the only parts that move are the eyes). Notice the astigmatic smears are gone. The picture also seems crisper to me, but that might be hard to tell in these examples. I'm guessing there is an over all astigmatism, possibly due to most everything in the scene having a touch of Glow to it or being near something that does.

Where the problem becomes most critical is when small objects or parts of objects have glow. I saw this yesterday when I posted about a nice freebie for the Lucky Kitty Crew. Here is the picture I wanted, but due to the "bug" that moved the toy's eye glow, I had to reshoot with a screen cap to publish. Now, in a picture like this I'm sure many a reader is looking not at the toy on my shoulder but rather on "toys" a bit lower, but my intent had been to crop anyway (as seen in the actual post). Here it looks like the little artist is shooting flames at critics or being generally evil.

Until this can be fixed by someone, I'll be practicing Command-Shift-F1, the keyboard shortcut for Apple users to hide the viewer UI (meaning I'll have to change how the F keys work in Settings first ... *sigh*) then hiding HUDs or looking into the Film Maker settings that the Kirstens Viewer offers (Web) so I can take my pictures via screen caps when they are really important.

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