Grid Expectations

I’d been meaning to post this for a while but I’ve had a full plate lately and I’ve been a cranky-pants too :p but I’m over it now so back to blogging!

I had the good fortune of meeting Codie (a.k.a. CodeBastard Redgrave) early on in my SL existence.  I could go on about how impressive her SL photography and art is, her coding skillz and just overall brainy-ness (is that even a word lol), her machinimacam and vids, the fact that she’s a content creator who can make avatar appearance things like eyes and skins and stuffs, and the fact that she was Avastar of 2007… but you know what?  All of that pales in comparison to the gargantuan generosity, kindness, and warm-heartedness she exudes.  She is hands-down one of the nicest and friendliest people you will EVER meet in SL.  Ever.

Codie began an art/photgraphy project called Boudoir Rouge, and you can view the fruits of her labor thus far on her flickr set, which I’m extremely honored to be a part of.  The set was meant to be a celebration of women in Second Life; in her own words, it is “an ode to all the beautiful, brilliant, sexy, geeky ladies of the metaverse. Pure avatar shots, in the most playful pinup style. Welcome to the Boudoir Rouge.”

It looks, however, that it may end up being much more than that.  According to her blog, she’s looking into selling the series with the intention of donating most of the proceeds to charity for AIDS research and cancer research.  It sounds like this is still very much in the early planning stages, though, so if you’ve any ideas on how to get this fundraiser project off the ground or know of some resources that can be useful in this undertaking, please don’t hesitate to speak up. 

Hooray! I submitted two skins for the Another Fundraiser event that’s coming up. For the makeups, I decided to look at a couple of birds.

The peacock skin has blue and green eyeshadow with a soft pink blush and lipcolor. The swan skin has an alabaster skintone to mimic the white swan’s feathers, black smoky eyeshadow inspired by the dark area around the swan’s eyes, as well as a sort of dark orange-ish matte lipcolor that echoes the color of a swan’s beak.

And, I couldn’t resist… I had to play dress-up with the skins and then take some pics. :p Oh, and check out the little machinima I did to see how the peacock feathers move, it looks really awesome — my friend Vivi is wearing them at the 3:06 mark.

Credits/SLURLs for the items used in the following (photoshopped) pics are at the end of this post:

What I’m wearing:

Peacock image: Hair - ETD, Phoebe teal; Eyes - Simtropia, blue light; Peacock feathers - Reasonable Desires, from the Peacock Showgirl set; Lingerie - House of Nyla, Peacock Feather Lingerie; Body Shape - mela’s, upcoming release; Skin - mela’s, peacock skin for Another Fundraiser

Swan image: Hair - RaC Hair, Princess black; Eyes - Nomine, Orbital 4; Dress - Nicky Ree, Swan Lake Dream Black; Body Shape - mela’s, pink lady; Skin - mela’s, swan skin for Another Fundraiser

Gogo wrote about this a while ago. I finally got around to playing with it and got Aishwarya Rai, Kristen Davis, and Rachel Leigh Cook. ^^

Erm, okay I guess wordpress doesn’t like dealing with shockwave and stuff. o.o Static version instead:

I found out from Lex a few days ago that my object matte photo “me and ary” got a little mention in Torley Linden’s “Torley’s guide to high quality photography!”

Here’s the pic:

Yeah, it looks funny… but that is how the image was captured in SL, no post-editing work was done on it. To get this look, you must use the Snapshot function (the snapshot button at the bottom of the client or Ctrl + Shift + S) so that you can view the snapshot dialogue, so soz but “snapshot to disk” won’t work. (Yeah, no sneaking in any silent pics, lol.) You must also select the “Save snapshot to hard drive” option in order to activate the dropdown menu in the Capture field (which is located at the middle of the snapshot dialogue). The dropdown will show “Depth” and “Object Mattes”.

Here’s an example of a shot taken using the depth option:

Another mention I got was on the Brutal Honesty blog. One of the contributors to that blog, Tina Travanti, recently checked out my store Mela’s. In spite of some trouble with a poster I’d priced incorrectly, she had some very nice things to say about my store, for which I’m *really* grateful:

I love my new shape and even with the mix-up I was transformed in just a few minutes and very happy with my purchase. Mela the Slider Surgeon has a great product and has put a lot of time and thought into what she’s doing. You have to check out her store. I fully enjoyed myself and I will be sending people there for some slider work.

I do try to put a bit of thought into my store and what I make, so it’s super nice when someone says something positive about it. Thank you so much for the encouraging words, Tina!

Although the filters in the Filtering Second Life group are introduced on a weekly basis, my assignment #4 and #5 posts are back-to-back because I’d taken my sweet time getting around to doing the fourth one.

Okay, so I have a favorite method for vignetting; I think anyone who plays with image-manipulation has their various favorite methods, right? (FYI, it’s hand-painting on a desaturated layer with a soft brush, merging it with a filled layer, and setting it to Overlay.) Still, it’s nice to change things up, which is what I got to do with the latest featured filter. This week’s filter, which has been bestowed the awesome-sounding name Melancholytron, comes from Flaming Pear. It’s a sweet filter loaded with tons of options that makes achieving all sorts of vignettes a real cinch; play with the sliders a bit and voila! Talk about EASY.

** Please note, this isn’t a free filter; you can download a 30-day demo but if you want to keep it beyond that, you’ll have to spring $20 USD. **

Puma paid an impromptu visit a few days ago while I’d been setting up for some pics with my new green muslin background, and we ended up shooting some pics of her wearing Grace Winnfield’s black Gothica wedding gown. I chose to use Melancholytron on one of the shots I took:

This is one of those pics that looks better when viewed it in it’s original size.

The Filtering Second Life group was kept a little more busy than usual this week with two filters to play with.

The “official” filter assignment is from Auto FX and it’s called Dreamy Photo, and is available for both Windows and Mac users. This particular filter, although free, requires a quick and painless registration process before you are able to use it; simply fill out the online form and a serial number is e-mailed to you.

For this filter, I chose a sunset shot I’d taken in my home sim, Meddledown. (Note: I didn’t just use the filter on this image. I also added a desaturated copy of the original image and gave it a red-orange hue and painted over it with a soft large brush to add a more vivid, fiery feel to the sunset.)

original shot

retouched work

Our bonus assignment came from Gita Rau, who introduced the Luce filter from Antonino Perricone. This is a really cool filter that will cause soft rays of light to emanate from the subject. For this image, I chose to treat the filter as an overlay layer to make the lines a little more subtle.

original shot

retouched work

I’m really liking the luce filter, going to have to play with it some more in the future.

The latest filter to be featured in the Filtering Second Life group was an interesting one this week. It’s from Mehdi and it’s called Projection. (Sorry, Mac users — this is for PC users only. Apparently filters that work for both PC and Mac are extremely rare.)

I decided to use a picture of Gallia Plubeau modeling a body shape for Gogo’s store, Demoiselles, located in the new LicoLico sim.

original shot

retouched work

In addition to the filter, I added a tri-color gradient to make the largest image of Gallia (on the right side of the pic) stand out more, and just a tiny bit of a gaussian blur which was screened at a lesser opacity.

Looking forward to next week’s assignment

Ryker Beck recently sent me an invitation to join a new Flickr group called Photoshop Me: Filtering Second Life.

The basic premise of the group is simple: Once a week, a new filter is introduced to the group which everyone is subsequently invited to download. The filter is then employed in one of their works, the results of which are posted in the group to be shared with everyone.

This week’s filter is called Bad Dream and comes from Xero Graphics. I decided to use the filter on one of my older images, here are the before and after shots:

original shot

retouched work

In addition to running the filter, I also made adjustments to saturation, threshhold, etc., and used a little bit of gaussian blur on a layer that was then screened. Cropping the image also made the Godzilla-ish monster dominate more of the space, making him seem even larger. I’m kind of happy with how the pic turned out. ^_^

Also posted this in my deviantART gallery.

I think it was about a week or so ago that Marquez, RL and SL DJ as well as Photoshopper Extraordinaire, paid a visit at Puma’s house. He ended up taking some pics of us while visiting, hehe: