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

[xel-squirgle-ox.livejournal.com]

I touch up my pictures all the time without any problems with pictures from the in-game camera. Just to do pretty photoshoots though, I couldn't bother with doing a whole story update like that.

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, but only so far. I have done some touching up on my in-game photos, but it doesn't take much for them to start to look really processed.

One of the things that doesn't bother me about the in-game shots is the slightly softer focus of them. I actually prefer that to seeing all the hard edges of the models. But it's not just a softer focus in some of the pics... there's that hint of compression (mind you, it's really just a hint, and I'd hardly be bothered by it in someone else's pics - when I say I'm picky about images, I'm almost always talking about composition).

[sadieg79.livejournal.com]

You must have a great graphics card then, 'cause every time I try it looks awful, at least to my perfectionist eye. You do a good job though :)