The title of this blogpost is the name of a Windlight-setting, one I have picked to show how I edit wind-lights to my liking, after I was challenged to show off my favourite windlight. I do not have a favourite though, I tend to edit all sorts of windlights into something completely different and they are hardly the same on any picture, although some may resemble each-other.

After some thinking and pondering I decided to turn this challenge into a mini-tutorial on how I usually play around for let’s say: a portrait of myself! I never use studio’s or any prim-background for portraits, I prefer to play in the outdoors and always either stand in a sandbox – with nothing behind me – or in some ocean, with my back to the open sea, allowing me to use the sun and moon and whatever to create the shadows and light I want.

For this portrait I stood in the sea, hehe, and my first step is – I am skipping the styling and all that – is to push up the graphics to ultra, but no dept of field in this case.
(note: you can click on the images in this post to get the larger version, also keep in mind I am using the official LL Viewer so for other viewers the menus may look different!).

Then I go to the, for this blog post, windlight-setting [EUPHORIA] low saturation dull deposit, in the sky edit menu:

This setting, without any editing makes me look like this:

Nice…but not what I had in mind, so time to play with the sliders in the edit Sky Preset – menu!

I use the three tabs to play around: Atmosphere, Lighting and Clouds

In ‘Lighting’ (I always start with that one), I choose another Sun/Moon colour, today I made it orange (okay, I do that often, I just love orange..) and set removed the stars by sliding the Star Brightness all the way to the left, positioned the Sun/Moon to somewhere after 12PM and played wit the East Angle to get the right light on my face. And last but not least I upped the Scene Gamma a tad, to make it all a bit brighter:

Then in ‘Atmosphere’ I pushed up the Haze Horizon, Haze Density and the Max Altitude and Distance Multiplier till I found the desired effects (you will see the changes when you start using the sliders), like this:

Last but not least, although happy with the colours and shadows, I went to the ‘Clouds’ tab and locked the clouds, making them static as I like them for the pictures background, this saves a lot of waiting for the perfect cloud and endless snapping till you get them when you use a windlight that has moving clouds:

The endresult of my playing as above is this portrait, not photoshopped (I only cropped it and added my signature):

 

You can do all this with any wind-light of your choosing, and you can choose to save them as well, something I never do…because: lazy and I edit them all the time anyway :).

Happy experimenting!

Credits:
* Hair – +Elua+ Hollis 1 @ The Chapter Four
* Dress – AMITOMO Turtleneck dress @ The Chapter Four
* Ears – Mandala Seasons5 ears, Elf