How to take high-res pics and gifs

[Nova Starlight]

I wanted to create a few tutorials on the forums, but I don't know how to make high-quality visual guides. How does everyone do it? As seen in my post, the image quality is terrible. I used the steam screenshot option. I also don't know how to make short gifs.

 

[blakemw]

To make videos you need to have video capture software. Nvidia and AMD both provide this, and in Windows 11 you can use XBox Game Bar which is built in, alternatively you can use OBS, which gives a lot of control, like you can capture like a 1024x1024 square or something which is great if you don't benefit from having the whole view captured, video editors can also do trimming but capturing it directly is pretty good and OBS is really good if you're willing to put some effort into learning it.

Once you have a video you should post it as a video, hopefully you're just using "gifs" as a word for short videos, but in any case actual video is nearly always better than gif format. These forums will embed videos from youtube and such.

For high quality screenshots, use the OS screenshot function rather than steam, this should capture to the clipboard and probably also a file, often a PNG (uncompressed file), though old versions of windows only capture to the clipboard and you have to manually paste it into a graphics editor and save. In most OS's these days hitting the PrtSc key, if your keyboard has one, will activate the screenshot functionality. For large screenshots (4K or something) you might want to use JPG to reduce file size, but if the screenshotted area is relatively small PNG is totally fine, also FWIW some image hosts like imgur will always compress large files.

I don't really like the Steam screenshot function because it's pretty lackluster, also the OS screenshot tool, if it's relatively modern, lets you select an area which is great. But you can also go to steam settings and choose uncompressed screenshots.

 

[nakomaru]

I recommend ShareX for creating short gifs, anything for capturing screenshots as PNG files, and OBS for capturing long form video with sound. I don't think the referenced post images are terrible though.

[Nova Starlight]

16 hours ago, blakemw said:

To make videos you need to have video capture software. Nvidia and AMD both provide this,...

Well I have crappy Intel integrated graphic so...

[blakemw]

2 hours ago, Nova Starlight said:

Well I have crappy Intel integrated graphic so...

Intel offers equivalent video capture function in the "Intel Graphics Command Center" if your system is modern enough, unfortunately depending on how crappy the intel integrated graphics are it may be difficult to achieve good frame rates while capturing video. You can also investigate OBS, it'll probably put more load on the system though selecting a smaller area of the window to capture helps a lot and there's a considerable amount of tuning that can done.