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Screenshot Taking Advice


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Can't say I can be of much help with your ENB troubles but I can possibly offer some general screenshooting tips.

 

 

#1: ENB is vastly overhyped.

 

It does a lot of good and I'm not bashing it, but it isn't the end-all be-all of screenshooting. There are perfectly good weather/lighting mods available that greatly improve the light situation of Skyrim without nearly the performance cost of an ENB. I should know, I don't use ENBs. About the most critically useful thing ENBs add is depth of field, which can help a lot when you're trying to maintain focus on a character and not the background, but even that can be mitigated with magelight trickery or placeable light mods.

 

 

#2: Composition is critical.

 

It doesn't take long browsing any screenshot thread ever to see it. Some folks just can't compose a shot for shit. Angles in the backgrounds are weird, there's uninteresting and/or dead space everywhere, something thematically sticks out like a sore thumb, etc. You can't always avoid it, but there are things that help such as FOV commands and the like.

 

Let's see some examples, using my own shots (to further hit home point #1) [nsfw - nudity].

 

Good

This. See how the light in the mist frames her? The cool, moody lighting and dark shadows make her stand out against what is otherwise a rather busy background. The mist obscuring background detail helps too.

 

Also this.. The character is waaay to the left, but the mammoths in the midground (middleground?) make sure the space isn't dead and uninteresting. On a related note, see how godawful my outdoors shadows are? That's another good thing ENB fixes.

 

Bad

All grades of jacked up. Too much going on, no matter how much fov I tried to tweak, it just didn't turn out. This was doomed from the start, which is sad because I loved the concept behind it so much and waited so long for that lightning strike. >:C Specifically, foreground is way too intrusive, stealing the character's presence. The lightning bolt lacks impact, due to the angle. And everything behind her is just... boring.

 

Eh... It's an example of bad, but of acceptable bad. This was part of a story post I did somewhere else. Its main problem is very little is going on. It's like 75% rock, utterly droll. While the image does tell a story on its own, what with the top playfully discarded, it doesn't make it a good image on its own.

 

 

#3 I breathe now in royalty and reshape this land which is mine. I do this for you, Red Legions, for I love you.

 

This is a line from good ol' Heimskr. It tells the story of how Talos converted the jungles of central Cyrodiil into temperate forest like we saw in Oblivion. What do I mean by this? Get landscape mods. New lands or edits to Skyrim, either way. Anything to add new and interesting places to screenshoot. Tropical Skyrim is a popular one, but if you want something more lore-friendly and less intrusive, I'd recommend the aptly named Caribou Gone. It's a very woody-sounding mod that adds new trees to Skyrim, mostly in the warmer regions, as well as editing some vanilla trees. The Rift is more colorful with reds and greens, and would you believe that [url=http://i.imgur.com/4JZPl7L.jpg]this[/url is the Reach?

 

 

#4 MFG commands totally make a massive difference.

 

Seriously I was skeptical at first. People not updating their games because 1.9 broke these befuddled me. But now that I've actually played with them? I understand completely. Do not, do not underestimate these.

 

 

Hope this helped.

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That's running much better! Still a little stuttery, but usable for posing and almost playable!

 

Are there any other things I can turn off to improve the FPS just a little more?

 

Do you use skyrims flora overall?

 

If so also use ====>Grass on steroids<==== it will give a very good fps boost if set at iMinGrassSize=120 in skyrim.ini under grass.

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I always mean to set up ENBs and my game's graphics setup just for screenshots like some of the best of this community do, but that would involve an organised and tidy mind which I don't have. I'm the same with SCs as I am photography - live with what you've got to hand and hope the composition carries it. 

 

A decent lighting mod (enb), good model (body/textures) and environment detail (SMIM, 2k textures etc) takes a lot of hard work out of it. The rest is down to your composition. I've seen loads of great screenshots on here that had nothing but vanilla textures and lighting, but the composition rocked. 

 

All said and done though - ENB...depth of field alone makes screenshots look fantastic. 

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I've never used ENB for screenshots. I tried them for a little while, but my laptop isn't nearly powerful enough for performance ENBs, much less the more impressive ones. That's not to say that I wouldn't use them if I could -- I absolutely would -- but my computer just doesn't have the required "oomph" to run them well enough.

 

Having said that, though, I still get shots like this:

 

 

TESV_2014_01_06_10_36_28_58.jpg

 

 

I get shots like that one using SweetFX instead of an ENB combined with the Dynavision mod for dynamic depth-of-field using the in-game DoF effect. It's not as clean and fancy as using an ENB with DoF and ambient occlusion, but SweetFX offers some great options for post-processing the image (I use the Cineon DPX, bloom, contrast enhancements, and FXAA antialiasing), and the FPS hit that I usually get is around 3-5 FPS, so my game runs very consistently around 30-40 FPS at all times. My game still runs smoothly with everything enabled and my game looks pretty enough for me... plus, I don't have to disable any of the effects or deal with some of the oddities of ENB. :)

 

If you want my SweetFX settings and such, I can provide those sometime later on (I'm not on my Windows 7 partition right now), but I hope that gives you something to consider at least. :)

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Sometimes ENB can ruin good shots, completely destroying the mood.

 

I'd suggest ELFX if I had to choose just one enhancing mod. ENB I still do like because of DoF, what it can do for skin tones, and how it fixes the shadow stripping problems the game has. 

 

I also value composition as the most important thing, like how all the shapes come together to form a coherent picture. Subject matter is a different story, as that's subjective, but composition I feel is always #1. A piece of advice I read somewhere was that if the thumbnail looks good, it's possibly a keeper.

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That's running much better! Still a little stuttery, but usable for posing and almost playable!

 

Are there any other things I can turn off to improve the FPS just a little more?

 

Do you use skyrims flora overall?

 

If so also use ====>Grass on steroids<==== it will give a very good fps boost if set at iMinGrassSize=120 in skyrim.ini under grass.

 

 

No, haven't tried! I'll take a look. Thanks!

 

And thanks for the tips from everyone else too.

 

A final question, is there a mod which lets you port a PC into an NPC? I'd like to make a PC and then turn them into an NPC so they can pose with my other PC. Best way to do that?

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