Second Life - Alchemy viewer - Lightbox settings guide

A quick and dirty pictured guide on how to access the Lightbox menu of the Alchemy viewer for Second Life and on its features.

 

How to get the Lightbox button:

1. Right-click anywhere on your existing toolbars for the context menu, then click on "Toolbar buttons..." to open the Toolbar Buttons floater.

(If you have somehow gotten rid of all of your toolbars, you can click on on the "Me" menu in the top menu bar of Alchemy viewer and then click on "Toolbar buttons..." there, in the lowest section of the menu.)

2. In the Toolbar Buttons floater look for the Lightbox button and then drag & drop it where you want it to go on any of your toolbars along the sides or bottom of the screen.

 

The different tabs of the Lightbox menu:

 

1. Image tab

In the Image tab we find options to enable color grading presets, apply sharpening, and use customizable tone mapping.

I will explain this further in a separate section after we've gone over the rest of the tabs.

(The following guide images will have "CrossProcess - Cool" enabled.)

 

2. Rendering tab

In the Rendering tab we find various performance and quality related settings. These mostly depend on what your hardware can handle of course.

A WARNING about the "Resolution Scale" slider! This controls the internal rendering resolution of the viewer.

While setting it lower than 1.0 will make things more pixelated and run faster, the opposite is of course true for settings higher than 1.0.

So be careful that you do not crank this up too far, or you could slow down your viewer and possibly even your whole system if your hardware become too strained with rendering SL at an extreme resolution.

 

 

Of special note in this tab is the "Light Intensity Scale" slider. This allows you to reduce or increase the strength of all lights.

A potential application for this could if be if you are shooting a picture in a public place that you can not modify yourself.

If the local lights in that location are too dim or too bright, you can tweak them on your end by using this slider to help make your shots look their best.

(Cranked up high in my example image simply to demonstrate.)

 

3. Shadows tab

The Shadows tab allows you to tweak all of the shadow parameters, which might be useful for refining them, making their edges softer through blur, or minimizing shadow artifacts.

 

 

4. Glow tab

 The Glow menu allows you to tweak the intensity and softness of glow.

 

5. DoF tab

In the DoF tab we can tweak the Depth of Field settings.

(If you like to take snapshots at resolutions beyond your native resolution you will find that the effect sadly doesn't properly scale to the new resolution and you may have to make it extreme on screen for it to come through in the rendered snapshot.)

(Also, as you can see in my hair, alpha translucency unfortunately may "cut into" the DoF effect.)

There is also the option to make the focus follow your mouse pointer instead of being set where you aimed your camera at, and then you can use the shown shortcut (Alt+Shift+X) to lock the focus where your mouse cursor is currently at.

 

Now to using the Image post-processing in more detail:

1. Colorgrading

Enabling color grading and selecting a preset other than Neutral will apply post-processing that alters the colors, contrast, saturation, black levels etc.

 

Most of the provided presets are rather funky looking, but there are also some more natural presets, such as "CrossProcess - Warm" and "CrossProcess - Cold" which primarily alter the color temperature, but I recommend that you go through the list yourself to see what might appeal to you.

While these presets are static, you could alter the final result further through tone mapping, which we will look at in a moment.

2. Sharpen

The sharpen feature will do what it says on the tin, sharpen the image to the extend that you set along the slider. I like to use CAS 0.8, but you should play around with it yourself. For example the sharpen may make skin details such as freckles stand out a little more, if you would like them to.

3. Tonemapper

Tone mapping is a process that will map different tones to a set of colors in order to make them appear to have a better dynamic range. In essence it allows us to control how vibrant (or muted) the colors appear. How you utilize it depends on your image and the effect you are looking to achieve. If you are trying to portray a dreary thunderstorm for example, you wouldn't usually boost the colors to appear more intense.

 

Alchemy viewer provides us with different tone mappers, which are:

- ACES

This is the tonemapper selected by default and it is the most basic. The only control it provides is the exposure level. It's simple, but that might be all one needs sometimes.

- Uchimura

The next tone mapper provides us with several more properties to also control how strongly contrasted our image is going to be.

 

- AMD LPM

This tone mapper is well-suited for giving your image an HDR effect for controlling the intensity of your colors overall.

It also lets you control the saturation of the RGB values, if you would like to experiment with some surreal color sets.

 

- Uncharted

The last tone mapper also plays around with HDR appearance, but with finer control over the intensity of the different color ranges in your image. I recommend playing around with how different slider values interact with one another.

(This is the tone mapper that I used for the photo shoot I did before this guide, by using the "CrossProcess - Cool" color grading to complement the moon light, then dialing in a pleasing clarity of color and detail on my more well-lit avatar to better stand out as the subject, while retaining softness in the darker portions of the image for the night time feel.)