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?
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Thanks Raven, that’s really useful information
Thank you, Raven! This always drove me bonkers. Figuring out and sharing the pixel dimensions is extremely helpful and appreciated. Finally, an end to the madness! \o/
Very helpful, thanks.
http://www.talia-tokugawa.co.uk/guide/image-sizes-for-sl/
bible.
Damn I have to wear that eyepatch more often. <3
Very helpful post. Thanks. The advice of saving them as presets is excellent.
how do you do it in paint.net or gimp? otherwise very useful post. thanks raven!
Will leave how to o crop presets in other packages to those that have them… Would be great to have the how to on that.
Thank you so much Raven I just went into PSP and setup the presets. I was wracking my brain on how to get the right size done easily. You are a life saver.
You can also use the “Custom” setting for the size if you take an inworld snapshot, and set the width and height to whatever proportion you need. I used that to provide a profile photo for my partner and it came out just fine.
I’ve been told that the profile photo is a 4:3 ratio, and I was able to take a properly proportioned shot of myself (since it required a bit of PS hackery to create), squish it to 256×256 and have it unfurl naturally when I dropped it in there.
One step at a time, Raven! One step at a time!
Cy – just to outline how I arrived at these numbers (it’s not rocket science) I simply did a screen shot of each window, cropped the shot zoomed in to the exact size of the pic in the UI, and computed the ratio.
I then played with different upload sizes to get to a size where SL didn’t downsize the shots to 256 in any dimension.
I do agree you can do a custom shot at whatever dimension you require. That’s a great point. I just prefer the precision of post editing in photoshop to get levels, curves, saturation and sharpening set up as well.
Great comment!
Awesome. Thanks for the info. It irks me to no end that SL squishes pics. When I want to show someone something I’ve uploaded, I often have to put it on a prim using the photo’s original dimensions (1024 x 712 pic on a 1.024 x .712 x whatever prim) which is annoying. I actually got used to putting the original dimensions in the description box when I uploaded the image as a sort of cheat sheet. It’s nice to have an alternative.
Now, off to poke around and figure out how to do this…
I’ve been using things like 4×3 ratios because I had made the assumption…silly me…that it would call for a ratio that was fairly straightforward. But why expect that…after all, is there any logic that pics, profile and lm pictures are all different sizes? Is there any logic that your profile pic – which most would like to be a portrait shot, is a horizontal rectangle instead of a vertical one or a square?
Thank you ! Very informative and helpful
That’s both interesting and super-useful..thanks very much for sharing!
=^..^=
can you dumb that down a bit more, or can I just send you all my pics and pay you to crop them for my profile etc? LOL… I have no clue how to do that, and can barely crop a pic in PS without breaking a nail.. BUT having said that, thanks for clarifying why things look so out of whack when you put them in your prof.. you rock socks
This might help you out Babs (that and the last paragraph that just gives you the crop dimensions)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmjSaJiNpj8
This is the SL aspect ratio resource I always point folks to when they’re puzzling over how to make 1L and Picks images non-squishy:
http://tentacolor.com/2007/12/01/jaceks-guide-to-aspect-ratios/
Nice Amyla