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How to make your screenshots look amazing

Chaosy

Tutorial Reviewer
Level 40
Joined
Jun 9, 2011
Messages
13,182

How to make your screenshots look amazing

For people without art talent

By Chaosy


Introduction

I learned this trick in school yesterday and I thought I would share how to apply this to your map presentation or whatever. It requires 0 art skill, you only need to use the right tools.

It's worth mentioning that you can achieve this effect through other means, such as: Fake HDR Lighting in Warcraft 3

Requirements

-Image Editing program, I use Photoshop but the same tools exist in free programs such as Gimp.
-A few minutes of your time, once you've done this once or twice it takes 2 minutes per picture max.​

Levels

To begin with, you need a screenshot. Follow this (How to Add a Screenshot to your Map Description) tutorial if you do not know how to create a screenshot.​

e72983ad8fcb6dc58265fa95f8e285ad.jpg

Once you're done, open your fancy editing program and find the Levels tool.​
375b69e9eef7f8e10fcf9011da47584d.png

We're then going to change "Channel" and edit "Red", "Green" and "Blue" one by one.
You will see a graph with three triangles under them as shown in the image below.
We're going to move the two outer ones so that they are positioned at each side of the 'hill'.p​



99334c4c3d5d8fa0e46d4ed8373f8b1b.png

d5a4cfc440033204a13b08e2d523c681.png
7cad82ecbf4f387cc538840957ad5315.png
49b9e1a09ea261aaf1d016cf1bf7ac3a.png

Result

5f78cded487bccf63af46dd967b2d9ec.png

Comparison

9930381729bbaf4492429eb927f767be.gif

Feather (optional effect)

While the screenshot itself has been improved it still looks pretty boring shape wise. With the use of a tool called feather we can change that.
Press Ctrl + A, and then use Free Selection tool to reduce the size of the selection so that it almost reaches the edge of the image.​
a7568dd8808fc9da83259bd4e28ac900.png

bded1b0332080f8e5fdbbdc8de5c74ec.png

Once your selection is done, double click to confirm its placement.​

4d1d7f88515d37bc969daf5b589564ff.png

Once selected, the tool will ask for a number of pixels. I would recommend using anywhere between 5-10 pixels, though it depends on the size of the image. Large image = more pixels.​
1e190316c7bdca913ae32d2d3b262eac.png

If you've done everything so far correctly, the corners of your selection will be round-ish.
Right click your selection and find Select Inverse.​
5f9a3b681990a33e3059b0ca04e49b27.png

Then press delete and you're done!​

Result

23d08eecf64349cb70c44465ada327a4.png
 
Last edited:

sentrywiz

S

sentrywiz

Not bad, its a neat little tut about improving screenshots.
Though it would benefit lot more from multiple examples of other tools.
Filters, saturation, gamma correction, hue...
Useful tut nonetheless.
 
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