How to use the studio.

The photo

The skin is only as good as its photo. A good photo is:

• Front-facing, both ears about equally visible.
• Even, soft light: no hard side shadows, no strong colour cast. A photo lit from one side can be evened out in the studio, but a hard shadow never fully goes away.
• Closed mouth, neutral expression: a smile bakes permanent creases.
• Hair off the face: anything covering skin becomes part of the skin.
• Sharp and reasonably large, the face at least about 600 px across.

Make my face: from a photo

The From image tab takes you from a photo to a finished face in five steps. Your photo goes onto one of our painted Session heads. The head gives the skin around your face, the ears and the neckshade; the photo gives your face.

Step	What you do
1 · Your photo	Choose Woman or Man and light or dark skin, then drop a photo, click to choose one, or use the webcam.
2 · The head	The studio picks a Session head and reads the tone from your photo. If the tone looks wrong, pick another from the row under the card.
3 · Line up your photo	The photo lies half see-through over the head. Line up the eyes; nothing else has to fit yet. Drag to move, pull a corner to scale, use the top handle or the Rotation slider to turn. Line up again places it automatically once more. Level eyes matter for the next step.
4 · Take from the photo	The head shows what Save will make. Change the whole face or one part; see below.
5 · Done	Your face is on the skin. The brushes and sliders are open, and delivery is under the head.

While you make a face the head stays in the front view, and the brushes and the whole-skin sliders are visible but do not react. They open when the face is saved. Start over, beside the text at the top of the panel, drops the photo and opens them again.

The whole face. Four controls at the top of step 4:

Control	What it does
Everything from the photo	On: every part at full strength, in the photo's own colour and light. This is how a face starts. Off: the Session head's light and colour, with only the photo's detail.
Even the light	For a photo lit from one side. The broad light becomes the same on both halves of the face. Each side keeps its own detail; nothing is mirrored. The studio measures the photo and sets this for you, and says which side was darker. Pull it to off for the photo's own light.
Mirror one half	For a face half hidden or turned away: copies one half onto the other. A mirrored face loses what is uneven about it, a mole or a brow, so a lower strength keeps some of the other side.
Skin tone	One choice, two ways. Photo’s tone: the Session skin, the ears and the neckshade move toward the tone of your photo, as far as the Session tones go; your photo takes the rest. Session tone: the Session skin keeps its tone exactly and your face is brought to it. Either way your own colouring stays: lips, freckles, the light on your face.
Base lightness	With Photo’s tone: the skin, ears and neckshade a touch darker or lighter than the studio measured.

The parts. Skin detail, Nose, Mouth, Brows, Lids and Eyes, one row each:

• The switch takes that part from the photo, or leaves the Session head's own. Turn Brows off if hair covers them.
• Mouth line and nostrils. A photo from the front cannot see inside the nostrils or between the lips. When you save, the studio takes those two small areas from the Session skin and blends them into your face. If your photo shows teeth, they are covered the same way. A closed mouth in the photo still works best.
• Saving. While your face is saved, the studio lists each step over the head and ticks it off, with a line on what that step does.
• Nudge moves one part on its own. The nose and the mouth start fitted to the head, and your lips are shaped to the head's lips so the line between them sits where the head's mouth closes. Each eye is set into the head's eye opening, so your lids and lashes sit against the head's own eyeball; nothing of the photo's eye white is painted on the lid. The brows start where your photo has them. Drag the ring, scroll to scale, or use the arrow keys. While you hold the ring the photo itself shows, so you can see where the part lands. The skin around it follows when you let go.
• The arrow opens the sliders for that part. Size and Height, for a part you can move: bigger or smaller, and taller or flatter without changing the width. Strength: how much of the photo. Colour and Light: from "the base", the Session head's own, to "mine", the photo as it is. A part you changed is marked adjusted.

Below the list, always in reach: Guides shows yellow lines where the head's eyes, nostrils and lips sit. Hold to compare shows the head without your photo for as long as you hold it. Save my face takes under a minute.

Session skins

The Session tab lists our skins. Pick a face, a tone, and with or without brows, then press Bake this skin. It is a finished skin from the first second, and every tool works on it. You pay at delivery, the same as for a face made from a photo.

Judging the skin

Two light modes above the head:

Mode	What it is
Flat	The texture carries the shading. Judge on this. What you see is the file.
Lit	A key light with cast shadows. For presentation only. Never judge colours here.

Drag to turn, wheel to zoom, wheel-click to pan. The angle buttons (Front, ¾, Profile) snap to standard views. Center puts the head back without losing your zoom. Ortho switches to a parallel view without perspective, useful for comparing the two sides. Wire draws the mesh edges over the skin.

Two heads. For a woman's skin, the list at the top left of the stage lets you choose which head you look at. Session head · female 1 is halfway to the LeLutka head and is the one the studio opens on. Session head · female 2 is the older Session head; the studio uses it while you make a face from a photo. The skin is the same; only the shape under it changes. Small things, the line of the lips most of all, sit a little differently on a different head, so female 1 is closer to what you will see in Second Life.

On a LeLutka head. At the lower right of the stage there is a small picture of your skin on a real LeLutka head, as last baked. It follows the angle you have turned the Session head to. Click it for a large view with front, three-quarter and profile tabs. The picture is made on the server; the head itself never leaves it.

While you work, a stamp runs around the neck of the preview, and the preview texture is made so that it does not fit a real head. Both are there so that a skin cannot be taken out of the browser. The delivered skin is clean. Below the head you can see which parts the skin has: the face, the eyes, the ears and the neckshade.

Whole skin: tone

Fine-tune: colour sliders on the skin as it is now. After a tone bake, the baked skin is the new baseline. The sliders always work from what you see.

The sliders move the whole skin: your face, the skin around it, the ears and the neckshade together. To change only how the skin around a face from a photo matches the face, use Skin tone and Base lightness while you make the face. After you have saved a face, a Session tone changes the skin and your face together.

Slider	What it does
Darker / lighter	A gamma curve. Midtones move, highlights barely move, nothing blows out.
Contrast	Stretches tones around mid-grey. The extremes roll off instead of clipping.
Saturation	The bake can read flatter than the photo. −100 is greyscale.
Olive / red	Tints the skin without touching lightness.
Blue / golden	Cool or warm, independent of olive/red.

Session tones switches a Session skin to one of our painted tones. This is not a colour filter: each tone is its own hand-painted skin. For a face from a photo, choose the tone while you make the face, under The head. On a saved face, a Session tone changes the skin around the face, the ears and the neckshade; the face keeps what you took from the photo. Face, neckshade and ears always leave the studio as one set, and whatever you do afterwards in Fine-tune goes to all three.

Brushes

Tool	What it does
Rotate V	Turn the head. No painting.
Mirror paint 1	Paints the matching spot from the other side of the face, re-lit to fit.
Tone fix 2	Evens out brightness and keeps every pore. For shadows and hot spots.
Detail 3	Brings pore texture back where the bake read soft.
Saturation 4	Drains or boosts colour, only where you paint.
Heal 5	Hover the skin to take and press Space, then paint. The first stroke sets the distance, every stroke after keeps it, and you see the skin it takes while you paint. Classic healing, for lashes and brows too.
Borrow 6	Paints another Session skin into yours. Pick a skin from the library and what to take: its freckles and pores (Detail), its colour, or both. Freckles from one skin onto any other.
Liquify L	Pushes the skin with a soft brush, live.
Paint P	Blush, contour, eyeshadow, highlight, painted into the skin.
Mirror half M	Covers a damaged side with the clean side.
Makeup K	A separate layer. Delivered as its own transparent PNG for a BOM applier, never baked into the skin.
Coverage C	The one mask that decides where the photo shows over the base.

Each brush remembers its own size, edge and opacity. Ctrl+Z undoes the last change from any tool.

Session templates

Some parts of a face rarely survive projection from a photo. Eyelids carry lash streaks, nostrils carry cast shadow, lips depend on the light. For those, the studio has painted parts from the Session library, the same parts we use in our own skins.

• Eyelids, eyebags, lips, nose, brows and eyes, each with several looks to choose from (Amber, Brooklyn, Emilie, Enya, Kim, Maja, Sierra, Zoe and more).
• Pick one to see it on the head at once. It is rendered on the server first, which takes a few seconds. Nothing is baked until you press Bake changes. "From photo" keeps the photo's own part.
• The transparency slider mixes the photo's own part back in over the template. 0 covers it completely.
• Brows: painted brows from the library, or none. The photo's own brows are cleared underneath. Brow height raises or lowers them; nothing else moves.

Keyboard shortcuts

Key	Action
V	Rotate
1–6	Mirror paint · Tone fix · Detail · Saturation · Heal · Borrow
P L M K C	Paint · Liquify · Mirror half · Makeup · Coverage
Ctrl+Z	Undo
Alt (hold)	Preview the brush tip at true size
Arrow keys	While nudging a part: move it one pixel. With Shift, five.
+ −	While nudging a part: scale it
Esc	While nudging a part: let go of it

Account & security

• Invite-only while in beta. One code, one account. Codes come from Angi Manners in-world.
• We never ask for your Second Life password. Any site that does is phishing. The studio is built so that it never needs it.
• Linking your avatar: IM SessionStudio Resident the word login, get a 6-digit code, enter it once. The code proves you own the avatar. That is the whole handshake.
• Lost password: IM the bot reset, use the code with your new password within ten minutes. You do it yourself. Nobody at Session ever sees your password.

Wallet & payments

• Your studio wallet fills by paying the Session terminal (teleport) in-world. Any amount, credited within seconds.
• Only terminal payments count. Money sent directly to an avatar is plain money, not wallet credit. This is on purpose, so nothing becomes credit by accident.
• Purchases deduct from the wallet when you press Deliver. If a delivery fails, the wallet refunds itself, automatically, and it shows in your history.
• Transaction history is under your profile: every top-up, purchase, gift and refund, newest first.

Delivery

Product	What arrives
Demo · L$10	1024 px face with a watermark on one cheek, plus a clean neckshade. Enough to judge the fit honestly.
Full version · L$100 during the beta	2048 px: face and neckshade as one tattoo layer (BOM), ears as a universal layer. No watermark. The price goes up when the beta ends.

• Items arrive as an inventory offer from SessionStudio Resident, usually within a minute or two.
• Everything is no-transfer and works on any LeLutka EvoX head. No applier HUD needed, just wear it.
• Delivery always ships what you see. Pending changes are baked in first, and the neckshade and ears carry the same tone changes as the face. A skin started from a Session skin is delivered the same way.

Naming & gifting

• Name your skin at checkout. It is delivered as "your name — Session Skin Studio". The studio part is always there, so a gifted skin can be traced back to where it was made.
• Gift delivery: enter the recipient's username, the lowercase name in their profile, in parentheses after the display name. Their key (the long id) works too. Display names alone are not reliable.
• The recipient gets the items plus an IM naming you as the sender.
• Making skins for others, and charging for it, is welcome. See Support.