How to take Good Car Pictures.

[Vector]

One of the great things about RCS is that you can have an image of the car that you are driving displayed on your dashboard.

But, how do you take a good picture of your cars?

Well, I'm no expert but here is what I do and I think the results are reasonable

Here is an example of one of my pictures -

 

As you can see I take the picture against a white background on a white table.

I have found that it is best to take the pictures at an Aspect Ratio of 16:9 and Picture Size of 640x360 - not really got a clue what this means but it was what was written on the camera

The picture shown is not that great for use in RCS as you can see. In fact I have transposed most of my images so they work better -as you can see in the bottom image.



The next photos I take will all show the car pointing towards the right and will be taken from a little farther away. This should give more room for the text to show up better.

I have made all my car photos available to RCS Forum users - go to media to view.

Hopefully someone with a little more knowledge about Photography will add to this post in the future

Andy P

[Vector]

Just took some more car pictures that look a lot better when on the dashboards.








And them on dashboards -

[MrFlippant]

Why are they getting squished?
Is there a way we can get the native resolution for the dashboard so that we can make pics that don't get all squished like that?

[martin]

Greg the problem is that if your using a wide screen, the picture will resize to fit the screen.

[MrFlippant]

Then, the solution is to set the car image to a fixed ratio/size, and only resize the other things.
Maybe I'm a little OCD, but when images get squished and stretched, it bugs me. I'd rather see the sides get cropped or to see black bars, than to have the image squashed or stretched.

[Vector]

I'm not keen on the stretching either, but having black bars around the edges would cause issues with the black text.

[MrFlippant]

And to me, the text on the car image is redundant. Not only do we more quickly identify ourselves in the dashboard by color and position on screen (not sorting by position), but also the image of the car itself is a good indicator.

But yes, if you had black text color selected, and the image was letterboxed, then it might be hard to read the text. So, choose white text. ;-) Or choose white background for the image. ;-)

[Vector]

I don't think choosing white text is an option at the moment but it would be good to have the choice.

[MrFlippant]

You can choose white text, but I don't think you can choose a white background. Or, would the BG Color show if the image was letterboxed? That might be the way to go. Use the BG Color to letterbox the image (either on the sides or top, but maintain image original aspect ratio), and then you can choose the text color like now (white or black) to get the best appearance. Just need to make sure the controller screen uses the same size box as the dashboard for the car image.