How to take good screenshots?

[J T]

Ever since Steam added a shareable screenshot function, I've been enjoying snapping photos of some of the more evocative visuals I run across while gaming. I almost enjoy the photographing more than the game in some instances, and I really enjoyed the recent graphically enhanced version of Dear Esther because it gave me an opportunity to just roam a beautiful virtual world and hit "prtsc" on all the pretty parts.

If you want to see any of my pics, they are here.


My question is, however, are there methods for getting better pics with your games? I would like to do things like remove my HUD, or have a free floating camera, or to simply play through portions of the game without enemies to interfere. I like games like Dirt 2, where I have a replay reel that I can fastforward, rewind, and change camera angles to get the shot I want. I haven't spent much time learning to tinker and mod my PC games, but I'm wondering if anyone knows some good tactics for getting control of the camera and clearing out the screen to get exactly the picture that I want.

[Anapan]

You could make the desktop really huge (like 2000+ pixels wide) with a virtual desktop (your monitor keeps it's maximum resolution, and pans around the bigger desktop area). Then run the game windowed and maximized to have a much greater resolution that the game would normally have. This method works on some games. With that great a resolution you can crop the picture to remove any HUD elements and still have much greater detail in your screenshot.
I've used this menthod a few times to squeeze a bit of extra detail out of games - make sure you increase the draw distance to maximum.

Any 3D game will have at least your x&y position in memory. Using a memory search & modification (cheating) tool you theoretically can place your character anywhere in the current enviromnent. Usually the camera angle, height (z), and other values will be right beside the x&y coordinates in ram. The cheating tools usually allow searching for arbitrary values (eg. greater than the last search, less than the last search) so you could find your positional value by simply walking forward and backward until the memory address was singled out from the rest of the game's data.
A debug mode or dedicated cheating tool would be much simpler.

[sabrage]

Most games have console commands to remove the HUD. I know Battlefield 3, Serious Sam 3, Batman and Skyrim do.

[J T]

You could make the desktop really huge (like 2000+ pixels wide) with a virtual desktop (your monitor keeps it's maximum resolution, and pans around the bigger desktop area). Then run the game windowed and maximized to have a much greater resolution that the game would normally have. This method works on some games. With that great a resolution you can crop the picture to remove any HUD elements and still have much greater detail in your screenshot.
I've used this menthod a few times to squeeze a bit of extra detail out of games - make sure you increase the draw distance to maximum.

Any 3D game will have at least your x&y position in memory. Using a memory search & modification (cheating) tool you theoretically can place your character anywhere in the current enviromnent. Usually the camera angle, height (z), and other values will be right beside the x&y coordinates in ram. The cheating tools usually allow searching for arbitrary values (eg. greater than the last search, less than the last search) so you could find your positional value by simply walking forward and backward until the memory address was singled out from the rest of the game's data.
A debug mode or dedicated cheating tool would be much simpler.

Thanks anapan. These are great ideas.

Do you know if using these cheats/debug features would mark me as a suspicious person to Steam? I don't want to get my account banned for "cheating" when I'm just trying to take some nice pictures.

[Anapan]

Multiplayer games - definitely. They will have multiple protections against those type of programs. Single person, probably not, but with steam involved it's definitely possible. You could get versions of the single-person games that are steam-free on torrent sites and deactivate the steam client while you're hacking the ram of those games (you already bought&paid for them them so it's kosher, right?). I don't use Steam myself, but if there's any sort of leader boards, or trophys that are tracked in the games, there will difinitely be some sorta protection from having your score/time/whatever compromised.

[TEKTORO]

Make sure you use not a fisheye,but yet a brown eye.

[Hobie-wan]

I guess this probably won't matter if you're doing it on a laptop, but if using a desktop and especially with a CRT, don't be afraid to push the resolution to the point where you get a crappy frame rate. As long as you're trying to capture scenery and still stuff, it won't matter if neither you or stuff is moving. Then you can capture something high res and crop it down.

[BoringSupreez]

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