Afterthoughts

By the time I found my pillow and blankie last night, it occurred to me that I should have fought a bit harder to use the Official Viewer for my pix from Cerridwen's Cauldron in yesterday's post so I could activate shadows. Sure, that viewer is a friggin' pain in the asterisk when it comes to changing Windlight settings, but the shadows feature of Kirstens still crashes my system. So I went back today after copying over all the Windlight settings files I could find and roughly composed one of the shots again.  Click-Snap!

But now I've run into a problem ... Google tells me that my previously unlimited storage space for Blogger pictures is now full and that to continue I need to buy more space. So I loaded them to Flickr and am looking at my options. But in the meantime ...

The first shot, taken with the Zest Windlight and Glassy water settings, from Kirstens Viewer.

Roughly the same shot, but from the Official Viewer with all the same settings, but shadows turned on.

Two main differences, the water being the most obvious one. The shaders affected by the shadows setting have given the water a far more dramatic look and I'm quite pleased. Secondly, and harder to see, is that the face light I used in is not as effective in the second picture. It is as if Zyx is no longer being lit by the near by torch. Clearly, more tweaking is needed. And for both shots I could have turned on the anti-alaising feature (and rebooting the viewer, as required) for a sharper image.

If The Lab can get their act together and create easier access to the environment settings ... maybe putting them in the Sidebar ... the Official Viewer could turn out to be a great choice for photography.