The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.

I've been playing around with Kirsten's new viewer for the past couple of days. It's got some good qualities - the main ones being the shadows and the depth of field newness. Supposedly you can see depth of field in LL's mesh viewer, but I couldn't. Kirsten's runs a lot better for me when using these features.

If you don't know what depth of field is, and I sure as heck didn't know it had a proper name before this week, it's when something is in focus and the rest of the picture is more blurry. Like this!




I have done photos like this before in SL but I had to heavily rely on the blur brush in Photoshop to achieve the look. In the Kirsten viewer, it was all done for me! Nice!

Do I think this is a game changer? Yeah, I kind of do, especially where fashion bloggers are concerned. The introduction of shadows started it. Most of the time, if the shadows aren't used excessively, the photo simply looks more polished. I'm a fan of my own photos - they're bright, clear, and you can see what I'm showing - but naturally photos from someone like Strawberry Singh look much more polished and complete because of her use of shadows. [And because she's just truly awesome at what she does.] And for machinima? Well, let's face it. New machinimas using this are going to be amazing.

I don't like to keep the shadows and the depth thingy on all of the time, though. I don't NEED shadows. I like things bright. And walking around with depth of field is odd because everything is basically a big blur and my eyesight is bad enough.

But oh...it does make for some great photos.