To screencap or not to screencap...

[strangetomato]

Okay, I've made up my mind. I'm switching to screencapping my images.

Yes, that's right... stubborn old me, who has repeatedly said she couldn't be arsed to go through all that trouble, has now decided that it's worth the trouble. Now that I've been taking screencaps with IrfanView and playing around with them in Photoshop, I see the potential. I couldn't really work with the caps the same way with GIMP, and I'm really liking the results. It's a little more work, but I think it's probably worth the extra effort.








Here's a scene taken with the in-game camera. I have to guess at the framing, because of my widescreen monitor format, and it's not very precise, even though I'm pretty good at it by this point.

There's also the typical jpeg compression happening, which is not extremely noticeable with these colours, and because my graphics are good, but it's still visible.




Here's the same scene, screencapped, and saved as a jpeg at the highest quality level. It's much more crisp, but not annoyingly sharp (I hate oversharpened images). The fact that I have the widescreen shot to resize and move around in the 600x450 window gives me an extra opportunity to fine tune the framing too, resulting in a better composition.

That last part is key. I could live with the slight compression, for the ease of it, though I have to admit that it really bothers me lately. It's one of those things that, once noticed, is impossible to ignore.

This was the shot that convinced me:




Red is by far the worst colour for showing the "dirt" from the compression. See how noticeable it is around the edges of things? (Yeah, that's right. Get in there and get a good look at those sim butts.)

I know that not everyone cares about such fine details, but I'm joining the ranks of those sim image creators that do. Content and composition are still way more important to me than surface detail, but if I can make the surface nicer with just a little extra effort, then why not, right?



 

Comments

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

I was reluctant to join the club, because I was afraid I'd lose all interest if I made the process too much of a chore, but I'm actually enjoying the extra step so far. It's another moment to zero in on what I really want in the image, and contemplate it a little. And maybe it will make me a little more selective... that's never a bad thing.

Can you explain how Gadwin "lets you choose your own rectangular area" a little more. Do you have the frame to view it in-game, or do you have to exit with each shot to see it? I have no interest in exiting the game each time I take a shot, but a framing device like that might be useful. Since I have a wide screen, I always have the option of reducing my images or cropping them a little closer once I'm in Photoshop, and I'm liking that freedom.

I should look into Photoscape. I also have no idea what a backlight correction tool is, but I'd love to find out, even if I don't do any processing to my images besides cropping and converting to jpegs (and probably won't, unless it's for an effect, like making some frames black and white).

[sadieg79.livejournal.com]

Basically, Gadwin runs in the background, and the beauty is you never have to ALT-TAB away from the game. With the rectangular area feature, what happens is that after pressing PrintScreen, your cursor changes and you then click and drag your mouse over the area you want to capture. There's a little thumbnail that zooms in on where your cursor is so you can fine-tune your selection. It means you don't need to crop in Photoshop, only resize.

I wasn't sure about backlight correction either, but it's handy if your images are too dark. It brightens up the picture using a kind of lighting effect, so used right it can add a splash of colour too, if the image looks a bit drab. It saved some early legacy pics (a different one) where you can't afford much lighting in the beginning ;)

[sadieg79.livejournal.com]

Forgot to add: after pressing PrintScreen, you need to press Escape to free the cursor, 'cause it tends to stick. Don't know why. I've heard it's best to save the captured images as .tif, then convert them to .png or .jpg after the editing process - something to do with preserving the picture quality.