Let me start this post by saying the following snapshots came straight out of SL, with absolutely no post-processing. Not even cropping.

Depth of field is now in SL!

I first got wind of this fun new feature via Plurk; Aki Shichiroji started a thread on the SLU forums about this and shared details on how to enable it. To play with this shiny new toy, you must use one of the super beta mesh viewers that are build 2.4 215482, or newer. I was using 215482 for these photos; when I installed the viewer, depth of field was already enabled as soon as I logged in with it.

If you decide to give this a try, I strongly recommend you read that thread on the forums because Aki explains which three debug settings you have to fiddle with, and what they do.

(Note:  Your hardware must be capable of enabling shadows in order for you to use this feature.)

While I’m on the subject of photography, I just wanted to add something about using the zoom hotkeys Ctrl + 0 and Ctrl + 8. There was a discussion on my Plurk timeline the other day about this. The Ctrl + 0 hotkey is super helpful when you want to take very up-close photos of your avatar’s face, because it helps eliminate that fisheye effect that occurs in SL whenever you take this sort of snapshot. Here’s a couple of example snapshots that I took:

These photos also had no post-processing done, other than adding the text and cropping. You can see how the snapshot taken with Ctrl+0 looks a lot better; my avatar’s fa (Read more...)

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