How to Take Artistic Screenshots  

This article covers the creation of artistic screenshots which are higher in artistic quality than typical screenshots. The objective of this article is to approach screenshot creation more along the lines of photography.

Graphics quality

Modern graphics hardware is often capable of much higher quality rendering than what it commonly runs at, as gaming usually involves a compromise between image fidelity and rendering cost. Various tricks such as "anti-aliasing" can help hide jagged, step-like boundaries at the edges of polygons, but at the expense of lowering the framerate on less expensive hardware. However, taking screenshots is not about performance. Instead of rendering images perhaps thirty or forty times a second, our aim is to render a single image which is to be displayed for perhaps minutes at a time - so the aim is to jack your graphics card's settings up as far as they'll go.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA graphics cards command around half of the market, up against arch-rival ATI. On an NVIDIA GeForce 6600, for example, there are graphics settings which are not directly accessible through Half-Life 2's in-game configuration screens - there is an additional "8xS" anti-aliasing setting which is definitely worth pursuing for taking screenshots, due to the significantly improved image quality when rendering masked textures such as foliage, fences and gratings. Examples of some of the anti-aliasing levels available are shown below:

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Improving Quality

1. Right-click on the desktop and bring up your Display Properties settings window, then click on the Settings tab. Now click on the Advanced button near the bottom, then on the GeForce tab. We now want to select the highest anti-aliasing mode available, so click on Performance & Quality Settings to the left, uncheck Application-controlled then drag the slider as far right as it will possibly go. In the author's case, this is to "8xS". Another example screenshot is shown below:
2. Click on various OK buttons, and restart the game. There should be precipitous drop in framerates

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ATI

ATI's Adaptive Anti-Aliasing performs a similar function to NVIDIA's "8XS", smoothing transparent edges of textures. It can be enabled through the Catalyst Control Center in the usual manner. All ATI cards above the X800 Pro range support AAA; however, X800 Pro cards have the feature locked by default. Following this guide will help you enable the option. Note that the level of Adaptive AA is taken from the level of regular AA.

With the Catalyst 6.2 drivers, "High-Quality AF" is also an option, again accessible from the Control Center. This will improve texture filtering, making textures at long distances and high angles appear sharper.

Types of Shots

Environmental shots

If you can use maximum settings without crashing your computer, then try using the ultimate settings possible, you may only get 2 frames per second but at least that one image you take will definitely be worth it.

Action shots

For screenshots which illustrate gameplay and other dynamic aspects of a map, it can be advantageous to record a "demo" of normal gameplay (essentially a film of everything which happens) and then to take screenshots during its playback - it is much easier to capture fleeting details such as gun muzzle-flashes, explosions and other events this way. FRAPS would be a good software to record video.

Post-processing

Uploading an otherwise unmodified PNG or JPEG version of a screenshot can result in a dark, impenetrable mess. There are, however, some simple tasks you can perform in post-processing which will make the screenshot appear more as it did in-game.

Gamma

The images a typical computer game saves in a screenshot and what it actually displays on screen are usually subtly different, thanks to something called gamma. A way of describing a display's brightness response for a given input value, a game's output gamma is generally different from a typical computer desktop's gamma. Some games will typically brighten low- to midrange-values much more than a normal computer graphics application - in Source, this is controlled using the in-game Brightness dialog/option box.

To make your screenshots look as they did while you were playing the game, it is thus best to use an external graphics editing program such as Photoshop or, in the case of this article, examples from the free, open source GIMP will be used.

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As can be seen above, the original screenshot is far too dark. So, bring up the Levels dialog box (Layer: Colors: Levels...) and increase the applied gamma from 1.00 - around 1.30 seems to be a good number for typical screenshots:

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For particularly dark images, it can be useful to apply "overbrightening" by decreasing the input level's maximum from the standard 255 to something lower - a gamma of 1.3 combined with a maximum input level of 200 can work wonders on screenshots portraying night-time or underground scenes.

Your image should now look something like the following:

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Sharpening

If you wish to reduce your screenshot's size, it can be useful to then apply a relatively small amount of sharpening. First, scale it down to the appropriate size (Image: Scale Image...) then bring up the Sharpen dialog (Filters: Enhance: Sharpen...). A value of 10-30 is usually about right - if set too high, black and white fringes may start to appear around edges and other details.

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Finally, your screenshot should look something like this 400x300 image:

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Saving

To save your masterpiece, go to File: Save as..., select the destination and type in the final filename (to save as JPEG, simply end the filename with a ".JPG") and press OK. To see what the lossy JPEG compression will do to your image, click on Show Preview in image window - increase the quality if necessary to remove compression artifacts. Advanced options include 'progressive' (image blurs in when loading, and file is often slightly smaller too) and different subsampling methods (for more accurate colors at the expense of file size).

ZAM recomends you save files in .PNG format, .JPEG image quality degrades the more times an image is read, .PNG do not degrade over time.

Conclusions

When combined, the above techniques can be used to greatly improve the images with which you show off your latest work. While they won't cover the cracks in a poor-quality original, they can definitely help differentiate your efforts from the crowd. So have fun, and happy screenshotting!

Information Sources

• Valve Developer Community

ZAM Network Wikibase™ Guides