Grid Expectations

I am still in fantasy dress-up mode. ^^

This faun (or satyr if you’re an ancient Greek :p ) outfit is from a collection called Titania’s Court by Riann Maltese, which you can find right at the entrance to Fairy’s Grove Creations.

I’ve been wanting one of these faun outfits ever since I first spotted the vendor for it back in October, but as always I was gripped by indecision as I contemplated the six colors that are available. I ultimately chose the white one because I think it makes for a nice contrast with my darker human skintone. The faun avs come in six colors, ranging from black to white, with autumnal-looking reds, browns, and yellows in between.

This truly is a beautifully made ensemble. For starters, the texturing work on every single piece in this set is fantastic, from the horns to the hooves.

I was also really pleased with how the legs look. The primary leg prim is a sculpty while the tufts of fur that appear around the hooves and at the leg joints are mostly torii. The texture covering the lower torso and thighs is on the underpants layer and comes in two versions, one of which does not cover the crotch (for all you kinky fauns out there, I guess).

For your head, you get a pair of sculpted horns and sculpted ears, and a prim tail for your tush. The ears and the tail are scripted to twitch and move, much like how you’d see a neko ear attachment move.

02/25/2008 Important addendum!!:  There are two versions of each color at the vendor, one for males and one for females.  Whenever you click on a color button, a preview of the av will show in the display, so that’s one way you can tell whether you are viewing the male or female version.  You can toggle between the genders by using the male/female symbols on the left side of the vendor. 

More on what I’m wearing following the jump…

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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

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

The filter being featured in the Filtering Second Life group at flickr is ColourWorks from Cybia. The filter has twenty different effects; the one I chose for my shot is the converse effect.

original shot

retouched work

I didn’t do a whole lot to this image other than use the sliders that came with the filter — I adjusted threshhold and cropped a little bit. 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:

There are quite a number of people from SL who haunt flickr on a very regular basis, and many of them are incredibly talented at elevating SL snapshots to an art form.

I finally got to meet one of these people in-world a few days ago. Her name is CodeBastard Redgrave (is that a cool name or what?!), a.k.a. Codie. We’d been meaning to intercept for a while but because of time differences and obligations, that hadn’t really worked out.

Until now! Codie IM’d me and we were both free, so I asked her to come over to my house in Peraut. We chatted for a bit when Codie informed me that she’d been taking pics of me as we sat. ^_^ Then she asked if I’d be open to doing a photoshoot with her, and I was like, are you kidding?! If you’ve seen the images that she’s posted of her friends, you’d be jumping at the opportunity, too.

Codie suggested going with a tropical theme, so we donned some bikinis and headed out to a place called… um, I forget the name lol. (I’ll update this post when I do get that info, I’ve got it landmarked because I REALLY want to go back and explore the area, it’s absolutely gorgeous.)

I had fun during the shoot, and Codie’s sweet and fun to chat with. Sometimes I forgot to use the backslash when typing and I think I messed up a bunch of her pictures with my hands moving, but for the most part I think I was able to control my movements.

I was surprised that no one interrupted us during the shoot; there were several people in the area and I think maybe a couple of them were mildly curious as to what we were up to as we stood around and posed. There was one guy that stood off to the side for a long time, but he never approached us. I know if I’d come across two women in bikinis just standing around posing in a park, I would’ve been nosy enough to ask outright what was going on, hehe.

After Codie had finished grabbing a bunch of high-res images, she set to the task of “killing” pictures. I don’t remember the exact total but I think she said she’d accumulated about 80 pictures; some of them had to go. She whittled the collection down to a set of 51 photos, which you can view here if you’d like.

She asked me to choose two images for her to enhance in Photoshop — one of just me, and one of the two of us. I made my choices, and then she proceeded to explain to me how she goes about enhancing the images with layers, diffusion effects, the liquify tool, etc. I was really happy about that, because I have a bunch of SL images on my hard drive that I want to tackle but I’ve been unsure where to start.

After a bit, she’d finished the post-processing work and uploaded them to flickr. Yay! Here are the two images: