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

[orikes13.livejournal.com]

OY. What I meant was clear in my head, but obviously didn't make it onto the keyboard. Sorry about that. :}

I absolutely love your camera work, so that's not what I meant. I basically was trying to refer to art snobs who would turn their nose up at this type of artwork. Anything to do with video games is not 'real' artwork in the snobby mind.

[strange-tomato.livejournal.com]

Heheh. No problem. I was a little confused by your meaning, but I assumed you didn't mean the images were poorly done. I thought you were maybe referring to the my use of Maxis and Maxis-match content. I'm sure that turns some people away. It's just a style thing, and it's fair enough when people avoid something because they aren't into the syle of the thing. We all do that.

That's very true. It's not "real art" or "real writing" if you look at it that way, but you could also argue that it's a medium like any other. Videogames might one day be regarded as art, just as movies are. Movies had to earn their artistic respect too.

I really love the internet as a medium for art, especially any sort of combination of images and text. (In art school, I was doing some narrative work that was really looking at what hypertext can do that other forms of writing can't.)

And even if it's "just" entertainment, there's nothing wrong with that. I like entertainment. :)