Looking for "Me"

No, this is not a Photoshopped sceenshot. This is me testing transparent background vendor photos. I just couldn't resist taking this shot of the "three" of us.

Pose Fair 2010 is a little over a week away and I am very excited. I love setting up booths, shops and the like and I am anxious to see what wonderful things people come up with for the fair. I have been working on a few things including a unisex Guys and Dolls mini pack and some other useful poses. But I also wanted a grab and go bag -- and so I made one. The bag, the pose and the bag WITH pose all come in this life sized vendor. I thought it would be cute and also nice for folks to see what they would be buying with their dollar.

That's the fun part. The "you might want to know this" part of this post concerns making nice clear manikin vendors. I did a little experimenting and here is what I found. Many of you know this already, for those that don't, here are my tips.

• You need a very high rez shot to start out with. I used 3000 by 2000 pixels. This is a higher resolution that I use for my blog photos.  Change this is the Snapshot pane and of course you need "High Rez Snapshot" checked in the Advance Tab. (Ctrl + Alt + D makes that tab visible if it isn't showing in your top menu.

• Those of you that use Photoshop have a "green screen" option I believe. I do not have Photoshop, so I have to be a bit trickier at times. If you are using a less expensive graphics editor take the photo on a solid background that is different enough from your outfit to highlight with your magic wand and delete. I used black, but I had to switch to a darker hair in order to get a really nice clean look.

• I chose a 512 x 1024 transparent background. Smaller would load much faster of course but I was going for clear. Transparent graphics are much larger file size than solid graphics, so use them sparingly and wisely. While I had the option of uploading as a png or a tga with the png file size being 1/6th the size of the tga, it appears that the files both end up as 2049 tgas after upload to Second Life (r). So while I would have liked to save some load time with the png, it didn't really help. Both png and tga looked exactly the same to me when uploaded. 

That's what I learned today. It was fun.

And yes, that's me in the middle. You can tell from the slight shift in perspective.


Style notes:

You probably know this, but Hair by Truth, skin by Tuli, top by Solange, pants by KOSH, booties by GOS.