What makes a great screenshot?

[Tailspin45]

Years ago, I proposed and managed a screenshot contest in cooperation with the San Diego Air & Space Museum. I don't remember the exact numbers, but we had over 2000 entries submitted online from more than 25 countries. The finalist's images were printed and mounted and displayed in the museum, too. I was delighted by the response and considered myself very fortunate not to have to pick a winner.

 

There were a lot of truly awesome images; but there were a lot of, well, not so awesome ones too. Why did I like some and not others? Why did people vote for some as a finalist and not others? For that matter, why did the judges (from the Museum of Photographic Art) pick some as winners and not others?

 

Simple rules of thumb

 

I've been a photographer since I was a kid, and use some basic rules of thumb to create pleasing images. They apply to screenshots too:

• Have a subject, a point of interest that will hold the viewer's attention. 
• Don't put the subject in the center of the image; use the rule of thirds.
• Find a way to frame your subject.
• Keep the horizon straight (a rule definitely worth breaking for aviation shots), and don't split an image in half with it.
• Watch for background clutter that will distract from your subject.
• Go here for illustrations of these rules and more ideas

 

But when I tried to explain what makes a pleasing image my answer always boiled down to something purely personal. Kinda like how someone defined porn, "I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it." Or as someone else tried to express the subjectivity issue, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."

 

But I'm an analytical kinda guy, so I wasn't satisfied with those answers. Someone must have tried to analyze what a makes a pleasing image. There must be some fundamental characteristics that distinguish wow from ho-hum. It turns out there are, and you can use those characteristics to make your screenshots winners.

 

Three fundamental characteristics

 

Researchers at Carnegie-Mellon and Microsoft asked professional and amateur photographers, and even non-photographers, to tell them what they thought made a great photo. Then they put computers to work digging into a mountain of images to mine the best ones. They struck gold when they found that people universally agree on three characteristics that make the difference between good and bad images. Read the study here.

 

• Simple

 

The single most distinguishing characteristic of top-rated photos in an online photo contest, it turned out, was simplicity. The subject, regardless of what it might be, was easy to separate from the background in good photos while snapshots-quality photos tended to be busy, confusing, and cluttered.

 

A good way to check this is to look at thumbnails. If the little images don’t catch your eye, full-size versions probably won’t attract you, either.

 

Two common ways to create simplicity are to find lighting contrast—a bright object against a dark background— that will isolate the subject, or use color contrast to make the image pop.

 

 

• Unusual

 

Snapshots were universally considered poor pictures. Why? If you think about it, they're nothing more than everyday objects in everyday settings—a simple photographic record of the world at a particular time and place. What do people like? Unusual was the hands-down favorite, anything that made an image different.

Good images, they found, are created using unusual angles and perspectives to produce something you won’t see in everyday life. A highly-rated photo was characterized by subject matter that was extraordinary either because the scene, action, or emotion shown was unusual, or because a common subject was captured in an unusual way.

 

• Correct

 

Photos people liked typically have some part of the photo in sharp focus, although the researchers found that, on average, blur was high. Motion blur can be used to show speed, for example. This isn't as much a factor in screenshots because we still don't have add-on cameras that, well, work like cameras that let us control depth of field or shutter speed. But watch out for distortion, you don't see fish-eye lenses used much for air-to-air work because you have to get inches away to use them. Aviation screenshots will loooong distorted wings or a pinochio nose look strange because you don't see them in real life.

 

But Screenshots aren't photographs

 

Here we're trying to use a simulator to show reality, not use a camera to depict something surreal.  The artists that build the ORBX terrain and airports go to unparalleled extremes to make what we see look realistic, and so do the aircraft designers. The folks that make packages that give us realistic weather and clouds contribute in a big way, too.

 

So to show off their skill, my objective is to use their extraordinary digital terrain, sky, and aircraft to create screenshots that look like a good photograph. Happily, screenshots I post online are occasionally mistaken as photos and then I feel like I have a winner.

 

If you use the basic rules of thumb and three fundamental characteristics of a good photo, you can make your screenshot a winner, too.

 

 

[Jack Sawyer]

Brilliantly written Tailspin!  Concise and very informative, I thoroughly enjoyed it, thanks for your help and it's given me some new insight and ideas!

[BradB]

4 minutes ago, Jack Sawyer said:

Brilliantly written Tailspin!  Concise and very informative, I thoroughly enjoyed it, thanks for your help and it's given me some new insight and ideas!

+1 - The last thing you need Jack is new idea's . What's next - Flying through a train tunnel , inverting the Queen .....but if I know you : It will be GREAT .

 

John

[Jack Sawyer]

3 minutes ago, BradB said:

+1 - The last thing you need Jack is new idea's . What's next - Flying through a train tunnel , inverting the Queen .....but if I know you : It will be GREAT .

 

John

What a good idea John!  Know any tunnels in Orbxland?  I can drive the Beemer though it!  I've already inverted the Queen of the skies several times.  The 777 was more difficult.  And I watched the original film of the double barrel roll on the 707 the other night, black and white film but still quite a feat.  But I can do better than that! 

[Adam Banks]

A very interesting read, Tailspin. I have a few things to add (!).

 

1) "Rule of thirds". This, IMHO, is pure bunkum. It just replaces one arbitrary rule with another. However -  avoiding centrally placed objects and horizons that effectively split the image in two obvious halves is a good idea.

 

2) Avoid mid-day hours: the colours are to strong/bleached out and you have no decent shadow detail on objects or terrain.

 

3) Composition/balance. Lots of ways this can be treated, but the idea is to achieve a visual balance across the *whole* of the image, where no area is more important than the other - so the eye doesn't get locked into one specific object. Naturally, FS sreenshots will usually have an aircraft as the main "object", so balancing that with an equally important area of sky or scenery helps. Like focus, however, composition rules can often be "broken" for dramatic effect.

 

4) "As real as it gets". This doesn't apply so much to photography in RL, but certainly does for computer/sim generated images. too sharp, too crisp, too flat can often make the image too obviously computer-generated and sterile. You end up actually introducing slight imperfections: slight blurring or haze to give the image more atmosphere. Some cheaply made movies or tv series/ads filmed with video often suffer from this: everything's too harsh and soul-less. Most feature films are still made using film for this reason.

 

5) Emotional response. Most good photographs (or paintings, in the past) don't try to recreate the event itself, but rather the viewer's emotional response to what the viewer saw in front of them. A hard one to define or explain, but it usually means exaggerating some things at the cost of others - rather like the way a caricature or cartoon can often be more of a likeness than a photograph.

 

I've been taking photogaphs since the age of seven (though I'm still "average" at best), but have worked in the visual arts all my life (graphic design, film editing and web development). Though not necessarily able to take great photos myself, I've used and composed visual material with them often enough to know roughly what "works" and what doesn't. Whilst most rules can indeed be broken, it takes someone with great skill (or genius) to get away with it.

 

Adam.

[Jack Sawyer]

Brilliant Adam!

[VH-KDK]

Interesting discussion and opinions here.

I had a "win" in the last screenie comp, I actually got a vote!

[paulb]

As a long time photographer and someone who has worked in graphics, I have no intention of joining any debate here .

 

But, just one observation from me -

 

This is an Orbx screenshot contest. That suggests that shots should ideally 'show off' Orbx scenery in one way or another? 

[Adam Banks]

42 minutes ago, paulb said:

This is an Orbx screenshot contest. That suggests that shots should ideally 'show off' Orbx scenery in one way or another? 

 

I thought the post was more a general discussion (so don't be shy!!) ... not specifically about the contest <???>.

 

Adam.

[paulb]

1 hour ago, Adam Banks said:

 

I thought the post was more a general discussion (so don't be shy!!) ... not specifically about the contest <???>.

 

Adam.

 

You are probably correct Adam!

[Tailspin45]

3 hours ago, paulb said:

This is an Orbx screenshot contest. That suggests that shots should ideally 'show off' Orbx scenery in one way or another? 

 

Concur. I struck me as odd that a number of entries in the contests don't show anything identifiable as an ORBX product—which is, before all, one of the rules of the contests.

 

FWIW, I didn't take Adam's comments as disagreement or debate. His points were excellent and useful (and well said). Anyone trying to create an attractive screenshot will benefit from his ideas. His point about emotional response is especially well taken. Artist such as Keith Ferris, Robert Taylor, John Shaw, and William Phillips have that part nailed. I often look at their work for inspiration

 

Re: his point about "as real as it gets" and the problems with computer-generated images. I add a tiny amount of glow or blur and a touch of vignette to control the pixelation and to frame the image in a way our eye and brain expect it to look. I also reduce the saturation just a bit; the real world just isn't as hot as simulators and displays make it appear.

 

In the end, though, composition is crucial. A perfectly tweaked image with lousy composition will still be a poor screenshot. Unrealistic looking, sparse, autgen is the quickest way to ruin a screenshot as far as I'm concerned.

 

If anyone else has tips to share why don't we share them here? What's the phrase, a rising tide lifts all boats?

 

To that end, does anyone have a way to get tack sharp screenshots without pixelated lines on objects in the middle distance? Drives me nuts to capture a nice screenshot and then discover that the paint lines on the side of the aircraft are all jaggy. I suspect there are graphic-driver tweaks that would help, even at the expense of performance. That's OK by me, I have a day-in, day-out, let's go fly, setup that gives me a smooth view, and don't mind a low frame rate or glitches when I'm trying to get a good screenshot. Thoughts, anyone?

[Adam Banks]

1 hour ago, Tailspin45 said:

To that end, does anyone have a way to get tack sharp screenshots without pixelated lines on objects in the middle distance? Drives me nuts to capture a nice screenshot and then discover that the paint lines on the side of the aircraft are all jaggy.

 

My solution to this is relatively simple - but does depend on a decent image editor. I [have to] use Photoshop for work, so all my FS-related screenshots benefit from it as well.

 

1] Open the full size image.

2] Crop and shrink to the desired/final width - but don't use "best for reduction" - use "best for smooth gradients" instead. That way, PS won't apply any sharpening whilst reducing pic size.

3] Don't do anything else - go straight to selection/sharpening. PS will use the *full size* image as stored in a buffer. The moment you do anything (particularly a copy/paste of an area), you'll lose that HD buffer.

4] Select a main area with 5px feathering (with anti-aliasing). My method for selection is to select the whole terrain area - but just inside (or below) the horizon line. That way, the edge itself won't get sharpened. Naturally, you don't want to sharpen clouds (!!).

5] If the aircraft happens to be inside the main area, then with the main area still selected, use SHIFT to create a de-selected area around (and including) the aircraft.

6] Look at any other particularly hard edges and deselect them, as in 5).

7] Use CTRL-H to temporarily hide the selection dotted lines.

8] Use the "Unsharp Mask" filter - typically at 50%-75%, but with a radius of 0.5px.

9] Preview the result by toggling the "Preview" check mark.

10] Make any adjustments to the selection (you may have missed a few lines that have become too "jaggy".

11] Apply the filter.

 

This way, you can add a fair bit of sharpening to terrain/vegetation/autogen without destroying detail on the aircraft itself. I rarely add any sharpening to the aircraft. However if you do want to tweak it a bit, simply invert the selection(s) as made in steps 5] and 6], de-select everything but the aircraft, then add some local sharpening - usually around 25% or so.

 

I hope all that makes sense!!!

 

Adam.

 

Luckily, I can still edit this post - so here are some test pics:

 

The original image (but cropped):

 

The areas selected (highlighted in red, to show what I mean). Note that I've also de-selected the lower edge of the bush area, as that was pretty "hard-edge" too:

Those areas with massive over-sharpening - just to show how it works:

 

The final image (using around 70% sharpening):

In this case, the aircraft happened to be totally in the sky area, so no "exclusion" selection was necessary. Also - I didn't apply sharpening to the far distance landscape, as I figured haze would probably blur it a bit anyway.

[Tailspin45]

Fantastic! Your instructions were clear, but the images really help. Never occurred to me to use sharpening, but your final image is much nicer!

[Tailspin45]

One other thought: someone once told me the quickest way to improve my photography was to share only my very best images. True for screenshots, too, me thinks.

 

[Orbxtreme]

Very interesting discussion here. Thanks for everyone's input, I'll use what I can of those suggestions!