Raven's Roost

Gadgets ‘N Gear: You’ve Got Mascara On Your Cheek.

// August 14th, 2009 // Gadgets, SecondLife

Ok, you don’t have mascara on your cheek, but you know how you can be at a party or a meeting and someone does? Or parsley from lunch on their tooth? Or, God forbid, their skirt caught up in their pantyhose? Do you mention it?

Can we talk for a second about photo aspect ratios and profiles? I’m never sure if I should mention it, but a lot of folks walk around SL with profile pics and shots in the pick list that are just WRONG. That’s because your profile pic isn’t square. Photos in your picks aren’t square either. If you use a square cropped shot here, the effect is NOT slenderizing.

The pick example above is a case in point. It’s a classic 1024×1024 square cropped portrait dropped into a pick photo. Holy wide faces. We’re doin the chipmunk thing.

Here’s the original shot. It works well for passing around in SL and putting up on a wall because it’s square, and SL likes square shots. You can see that our faces are properly proportioned. Nice.

So, let’s figure out how to get this working for us, not against us.

Aspect Ratio

Aspect ratio is a description of the shape of a photo – how wide an image is as compared to how tall it is. Squares have a 1:1 aspect ratio, because the height and width are the same. A standard TV has an aspect ratio of 4:3 – four wide to three high. It doesn’t matter how big the TV is, the ratio is the same.

You’ve already dealt with aspect ratio when you flip channels on your TV. Some stations are sending video at 4:3, the standard TV format while high definition is 16:9. To avoid having short stubby people or tall thin people, you either have black bars on the top or sides of your TV on one or the other, since both formats won’t fill the screen completely without distorting the picture.

SL Aspect Ratios

SL has aspect ratios too. The aspect ratios the viewer will force on a picture that is uploaded is 1:1, 1:2 or 2:1. If you’ve ever uploaded a shot that looked good on your screen but was all wonky when upload, that’s why.

Let’s look at how to adjust our crop (DON’T re-size or you’ll just be distorting the picture yourself) to get an aspect ratio that works for a pick placement. It turns out the aspect ratio in picks is approximately 9:5, so let’s crop this shot as shown below:

and now our photo is cropped to the same shape (aspect ratio) as the frame in the picks tab of your profile. Go ahead and upload it now.

Hey, wait a second – the faces are wide again. Yep. That’s because SL wants to display shots in the viewer with standard aspect ratios – in this case it’s showing it as a 2:1 ratio, which means we’ve stretched the faces again. Wait for it though. We drag the photo onto our picks…

… and it narrows it up again. That’s because the picks frame is now compressing the width of the shot.

Doing This All the Time

So, I take a fair number of photos and folks seem to like’em. They ask “do you mind if I use that shot in my profille?” Well, yes. Yes I do. I gave you a square shot, so it would look good in the viewer. It’ll look like hell in your profile – so let me get you a profile shot. Or a pick shot. Or a shot for your land’s LM.

I’ve got crop presets configured in PhotoShop that I can dial up to produce a perfect crop for each purpose (cause folks, every one of these scenarios has a different aspect ratio).

It took me a bit of puzzling using screen captures to figure out the crop configurations to use for various displays in SL. I’m happy to share:

• Profile photo: 600×512 pixels.
• Picks photo: 900×512 pixels.
• Landmark photo: 721×512 pixels.

So there you go. Can I pass you a tissue to get that mascara off your face?

Originally posted at Shopping Cart Disco