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

Ha! No being starstruck - I don't really know what I'm doing, and there are others far better at this stuff than me. I just like cobbling together what I've learned to help other people because it can be a long journey trying to work it all out for yourself, and I only really know what I know because I ended up part of a big screenshot community on flickr when the original Skyrim first came out.

I don't play on PC (PS4) and I'm guessing that means I'm licked if I want screenshots as nice as ITT?

Tried out SRWE! This is what I got before everything started crashing and burning, lol. (Accidentally left Resolution Scale at 2 before I resized the window to 4k, making my PC freeze up for a solid 15 minutes. Oops.)

Using a custom Reshade preset.

The sharpness you're seeing is actually aliasing. If you look very closely at an area with a defined line - for example on the bottom of the scope - and flick between the pictures, you'll see the one that was taken with resolution scaling has aliasing, and the one which was hotsampled doesn't (or not as much, at least).

It takes some getting used to, that a hotsampled shot can make an image look softer than it does otherwise, but that's because aliasing gives the impression of a scene being sharper than it actually is. I always take a native res shot of all my screenshots before I hotsample, and I notice it in every single one. 

You can add some sharpness back in via ReShade, but the more you add the more it will reintroduce some aliasing. Ioxa on the ReShade forums created a great surface sharpen shader for 3.0, but since I'm using 2.0.3 for the depth buffer and AO I can't use it, but if you're using 3.0 I definitely recommend taking a look at it. Otherwise, adaptive sharpen is good if you drop the values a fair bit. Lumasharpen is the age old and trusted one to go for. Remember, any sharpening will look less sharp at higher resolutions.

I don't know how the algorithm works for resolution scaling. Certainly, for hotsampling you're simply throwing more pixels at the image, so more information can be rendered, which is why models have more depth, and why it's excellent as a form of anti-aliasing. You'll notice fine details that weren't there before: for example, if you're by a Remnant structure, and you see those thin green luminous lines that move across them as if etched into the surface -- if you take a native res shot and then a hotsampled shot and compare them you'll notice lines appear that you didn't know were there. The same thing happens in other games with shots of foliage (I showed this comparison in my tutorial on page 1 - look at the grass in the middle distance how it looks so much more dense in the hotsampled shot, and look at the ferns in the front and how their fronds appear to have separate leaves instead of it melding together).

I liked how the different angle in the second shot made it look like the Assembler was running to rescue its dead friends.

360 shots can be really cool. It's just a shame that they can't be as good quality as a standard shot, because of Ansel's awkwardness. They also lose the idea behind composition, unfortunately.

Insert should both enable and disable the freecam. It does for me. I have it bound to side mouse buttons, along with pause (delete). I don't use the gui for those at all, only for specific controls like dof, lod, shadowmap res, and to reset the fov.

praxati -- What problems are you having with the Cinematic Tools?

It doesn't work in cutscenes at the moment, or on the Tempest. I expect those kinks to be worked out in time (DA:I's version of the tools wouldn't work in cutscenes for some time after launch, but they do now). You shouldn't be having any problems activating the camera at other times though.

And what don't you understand about SRWE? I intend to write a tutorial for it at some point, but in the meantime I'm happy to answer any questions. It's very simple to use, all told.

praxati, click the "Lock to player" option in the Tools to make the camera switch to your location again. I think otherwise it basically stays at the coordinates where you used it last and it can behave funky, especially if you travelled inbetween. And make sure your numpad is activated on your keyboard (or if you have a gamepad, it would be worth a try to use that for the camera - I find it a lot easier to navigate with it)

As for SRWE, I had to run it as Administrator to make the game show up in the process list.