#vinhallen

In Game

I use the same graphics settings for picture-taking as I do for my regular gameplay. This is basically it:

lighting/shadows and texture detail all the way up

visual effects, high detail lots and draw distance all the way down

tree detail high

advanced rendering enabled

The most important thing is to turn on edge smoothing before taking pictures. It makes a big difference, and you don’t need to restart the game when you turn it on. 

I always use one of brntwaffles’s lighting mods, with Gelina’s lighting tweaks. I usually use Cloud 9, but it’s too sunny for Eltham’s Drift. Those recent pictures were taken with Moonrise Kingdom and Dream Dimension. 

Editing

So that’s all I do in game. Now on to editing… TS3 has this really weird thing whereby things look great when you’re actually in-game, but when you close it and look at your screenshots it turns out they’re dark as all hell. (Maybe this is just a Mac thing? If so, my fellow Mac peoples will know about that thing where you have to go into windowed mode and back to full screen sometimes to get rid of the gross darkness.) 

So anyway, I use GIMP to edit my pictures individually. I largely subscribe to the @farfallesims method really, the major feature of that being I handpaint shadows when I’m trying to be fancy. But first of all, the very first thing I do is fix the weird darkness. I use Curves, and select the setting I always use—it’s just a curve barely above the baseline, to make everything a tiny bit brighter. That’s problem #1 solved.

Problem #2 is that horrible yellow-green cast that every Sims game has—regardless of which beautiful lighting mod you use—and which drives me UP. THE. FUCKING. WALL. That’s the next thing I fix, because I hate it with the PASSION OF A THOUSAND SUNS. In GIMP, I use Color Balance and in Midtones I set them to Red 3 and Blue 3, and in Shadows Blue 3. It’s a tiny difference, but it just cuts the sickly yellow-green tinge. I really don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, so I made a shitty video of just this color adjusting step to prove that I’m totally NOT a crazy person. It starts with the unedited picture, then jumps to what it looks like after color balance, then switches back and forth a few times.

Ok, onward: for random WIP pictures, interiors, or shots of houses I’ve just slightly edited and not spent much time on (plus for everything in TS4) at this point I will slap a filter or two on, sharpen that shit and be done. For this purpose I use the Beautify plug-in for GIMP. 

Handpainting Shadows

But for lovely, lovely TS3 exteriors of houses I have spent quite a lot of time on, I usually like to spend more time editing them further. This is when I handpaint shadows à la farfallesims—with a large, very low opacity black brush. After that, if I haven’t gotten bored yet I’ll also paint in some highlights with a similar white brush. I do this in a new layer so I can toggle its visibility to see how much I’ve actually painted and if I’ve gone too far. Gelina’s lighting tweaks greatly enhance the intensity of the shadows and the contrast between sunlight and shadow, so this is basically an extension of that effect. Plus I just like the softer shadows you get with this method. 

Here’s an example of a picture where I painted in shadows and highlights with irresponsibly reckless abandon to get that soft, glowy look. This picture is an example of the same handpainted shadows, but done way more subtly. I can be pretty heavy handed with the shadows when I’m just sharing individual exterior pictures, but when editing pictures of a house for download I keep it lighter (in the interest of not getting bitched at): for example, look at the first, unedited picture in this post and compare with the picture I edited for the download post.