Making the Most of VistaPro Making a stunning landscape in VistaPro requires the combined eye of a photographer and the artistic sense of a painter, but here are a few tips which can help improve your first attempts: Lighting: Experiment with the lighting. If the light is coming from behind the camera, scenes may appear rather flat. There won’t be a strong feeling of three dimensionality. You can create dramatic shadowing effects by choosing the proper lighting direction and angle. With the power of VistaPro, you can choose to light the scene in ways which could never occur in the real world or, if you are a purist, you can select the correct solar position for the particular season, geographic location and time of day. Our Distant Suns planetarium program (or most other astronomy programs) can easily calculate such solar lighting conditions in order to correctly set the light, target and camera position to obtain maximum realism in your rendering. If you just leave the lighting to chance, you may find that shadows cover your scene and it does not look as good as it could. We find that setting the light source at 45° to 90° to the left or right of the camera gives the best results. For example, if the camera is facing due north, place the sun at the southeast, east, southwest or west. Placing the sun directly behind the camera usually results in a lack of three dimensionality and contrast, although there are times when this is the desired effect. Back-lit scenes (for example camera facing north, sun shining from the north) can also yield interesting images. Snow and Tree Line Setting Considerations: If you know the normal range of snow line for the season that you are viewing and at what altitude the tree line begins, you can use VistaPro in a very realistic way. Tree line varies with latitude until, in arctic regions, it reaches sea level. Snow levels vary with the weather and altitude. A little research at the local library or even listening to the weather on the evening news will allow you to increase the realism in VistaPro landscape rendering. Of course you needn’t follow the real world as an example. You are free to set the tree and snow lines wherever you want. You may want to see a landscape as it might have looked during the last ice age or how it might look after severe global warming from the greenhouse effect! Changing colors: Use the Color Control Panel to change the colors, contrast and exposure used to render the landscape. Most landscapes shipped with the CD have shades of green for lower elevations, brown for middle elevations and white for upper elevations. Try changing the Tree colors to pinks and whites. This makes them look like flowering fruit trees in the spring. Change them to reds, browns and yellows for an autumn scene.