The Very Best ME:A Screenshot Thread (with tips)

To take the very best screenshots in ME:A you'll need a few tools. It can seem daunting if you've not used them before, but they are very simple to use and will greatly improve the quality of the pictures you create. You should be striving for the very best, and these tools will help you achieve that.

[Note: For those of us with NVIDIA cards, we have access to Ansel, which is a tool that allows you to activate a freecam and take high resolution screenshots. I will NOT cover that tool here and I encourage everyone to avoid it. Ansel is bugged in ME:A and you will not get the best from your shots if you use it. Ansel strips out shadowing and ambient occlusion (and possibly other post-processing effects) as soon as you activate the freecam. In addition, when using the super-resolution option, even more is rendered incorrectly, and sometimes composition is altered. On top of this, the freecam itself is very restrictive, not allowing you to roam beyond a small radius around your character. AVOID.]

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TOOLS

ME:A Cinematic Tools by hattiwatti -- (working as of latest patch)

This is your bread and butter and is the most essential part of your tool set. It hooks directly into the Frostbite Engine and uses its internal utility to achieve certain things. This is what it offers:

Camera:

• A freecam controlled either by your keyboard or a gamepad, with a simple hotkey to activate
  
• Hotkey to remove the HUD
• Hotkey to pause the game at any time (you can pause and unpause while freecam is active)
• FOV (field of view) controls
• Roll and Pan/Rotation controls
• Freecam can roam as far as you want, in any direction you choose (even outside the bounds of the map)
• No clip (you won't bump into models, instead the camera will move through them)
• Variable camera speed

Other Features:

• Game speed - you can slow the game down to get the right combat shot, for example
  
• Resolution scale
• Shadowmap size (to increase or decrease shadow quality on the fly and beyond the limits of the graphics menu)
• Fix LOD - to force higher lod (level of detail) in distant objects in some circumstances
  
• DoF (depth of field blur) - using the same DoF the game itself uses
• Vignette controls
• Film grain controls

Note: Game patches sometimes (but not always) break the Cinematic Tools, but they are usually updated within a few days. I will keep track of the most recent version in the link above. Future releases may add more options (for example, with DA:I Cinematic Tools we could control fog, character lighting, tonemapping, and more, and ME:A's Cinematic Tools update for patch 1.05 added vignette and film grain controls). If they are added, I will update this post.

SRWE

If you are not using Ansel's super-resolution (you shouldn't be) but still want high quality, large screenshots, SRWE is how you get them. It is superior to super-resolution, because it renders one large image, whereas Ansel takes a series of normal sized screenshots from all over the screen and tiles them together (this is why it breaks the rendering of many shaders).

Features:

• Hotsampling
• Change AR (aspect ratio)

Hotsampling - Hotsampling means you momentarily render the screen at a much larger resolution which expands beyond your monitor, take a screenshot, and then change the resolution back to fit on screen again. Hotsampling is a method of getting a downsampled screenshot without needing to play the game at a very high resolution (which will impact your fps and be impossible for many people who don't have the very best of the top of the line hardware). Downsampling means an image is rendered at a larger size than your monitor's resolution, and shrunk back down to fit. It gives superior image quality for a couple of reasons: it is the very best method of anti-aliasing out there; it gives the image more pixels to work with and therefore the finished picture contains more information and will look more detailed and in some cases help models appear to have more depth. Here is a comparison of a normal 1080p screenshot and a 6k hotsampled/downsampled screenshot from DA:I.

AR - Changing the aspect ratio means you can compose a square shot, a portrait shot, or an ultra-widescreen shot without needing to crop from your regular 16:9/16:10/native resolution. Getting the correct aspect ratio is an important part of composition.

ReShade

ReShade turns you into a lighting artist.

It offers a range of shaders that let you alter colours, brightness, contrast, and image quality via curves, levels, bloom, tonemapping, sharpening, anti-aliasing, hdr, hsv, liftgammagain, ambient light, dof, ambient occlusion, and a whole lot more. With the right combination of shaders and tweaks, you can change the blue night-time world of Havarl into a sunny daytime world, if you want. You can keep it subtle, just brightening the image a little and deepening shadows, or you can significantly alter the mood of a scene. You are an artist, and the game is your canvas when you use ReShade.

The current version of ReShade linked above works fine for the most part in ME:A, but there are a few quirks with how it interacts with the depth buffer, so dof and ambient occlusion etc may not work as intended unless you go offline -- this is because online games often make constant checks to detect/disrupt cheating and since access to the depth buffer is one way people can cheat. I recommend logging in and interacting with the strike teams as you need, then tabbing out to go offline in Origin, and when you tab back in you'll be able to use the depth buffer. Pre-3.x versions don't always seem to have this problem so it's up to you which you use. You can find most old versions here.


Screencapture Software

In whichever version of ReShade you use, the screenshot function seems to be broken in ME:A. So, you will need a different way of taking screenshots. Whatever you use, make sure it captures ReShade's effects, because not everything will. (Ansel will not.)

Recommended options are Bandicam (free) and MSI Afterburner (free) - both are lightweight options that let you change screenshot key, screenshot format, and the path your pictures save to.
You can also try Fraps (not free for full version), but in my experience it's a performance hog, it can be unreliable, and it doesn't accurately display the gamma of your image.

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NOTES

Each of the above tools comes with their own set of easy to understand instructions. Read them. Then read them again.

I will provide advice and help where I am able, but there is no substitute for getting stuck in and learning through trial and error. If something seems frustrating at first, don't panic, don't get angry, but step back and re-read any instructions, and try again. Using each of these tools becomes second nature after a while, and I have every belief you'll be able to do wonderful things with them in time.

As time goes on I will create separate tutorials for each of these tools. It will take a while because there's a lot to cover, and I actually want to play the game and take my own screenshots rather than sit here writing for days on end. As I write tutorials, I will link to them in this post and the first post above.

In the meantime, if you have any specific questions please just ask. I'm sure many of you are already acquainted with these tools if you've used them with DA:I, so if you think you can help out someone in need please go ahead. Let's all help each other.

Tip: consider changing the forum theme to one with a dark background. Mid- to dark greys are the best for viewing photos and screenshots on, because a white background can blind you to many details in darker areas.

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Tutorials

How to take high quality screenshots in Mass Effect: Andromeda - Tools
How to use the ME:A Cinematic Tools
How to use SRWE for hotsampling and multiple aspect ratios
ReShade Settings: Realistic Skin using ReShade
ReShade Settings: Fun DoF Effect
Mini ReShade Shaders Tutorial