How to Take a Great Screenshot

One of the most common questions I get asked by my readers is how to take a screenshot. In this tutorial I will not only show you how to take a screenshot but I will share my tips for taking a Great Screenshot!

How to Take a Screenshot
Quality
Positioning
Day Time Pictures
Night Time Pictures
Make Your Subject Stand Out

How to Take a Screenshot (the basics)

To take a screenshot hit CTRL-P, Print Screen or F11. Your screenshots are saved as .JPEG and can be viewed in your My Documents/The Lord of the Rings Online folder on your computer. If you want to take a Great screenshot then remember to hide your UI by hitting F12 and to turn off floaty names by hitting N.

I personally like to use Fraps to take my screenshots. I use the free version and it allows me to save my screenshots in .BMP which is a much better quality than the default .JPEG format Lotro saves them in.

Quality 

To take great screenshots you are going to want to set your graphic settings to the highest quality you are able to. You do this by going to Options (CTRL + O) and then looking at your Graphic and Advanced Graphic settings.

You will want to begin with adjusting your Overall Graphic Quality setting. The higher you set this the better your screenshots will look. (see below)

Once you have set your Overall Graphic Quality setting you can then play around with the other options available to you in your Graphics and Advanced Graphic settings. If your curious here is what I currently use:

Graphic Settings
Overall Graphic Quality: Ultra High
Graphics Hardware Level: DirectX 11

Antialiasing: 8x

Ambient Light: 1.00
Brightness: 1.00
Contrast: 1.00
Gamma Level: 1.00

Advanced Graphic Settings
Object Draw Distance: Ultra High
Model Detail: Ultra High
Animation Smoothness: High
Material Detail: High

Landscape Draw Distance: Very High
Frill Distance: Ultra High
Distance Imposters: Checked
Atmosphere Detail: High
DX11 Interactive Water: High

Texture Detail: Very High
Texture Filtering: Anisotropic
Anisotropic Filter Quality: 16

High Quality Lighting: checked
Specular Lighting: checked
Surface Reflections: Ultra High
Landscape Lighting Quality: Very High
DX10 Distant Landscape Lighting: checked

Landscape Shadows: High
Blob Shadows: checked
Stencil Shadows: Ultra High
Environment Stencil Shadows: checked
DX10 Dynamic Shadows: Very High
DX11 Ambient Occlusion: checked

Post Processing Effects: checked
Glow Mapping: checked
Overbright Bloom Filter: checked
Blur Filter Quality: High
Bloom Intensity: 1.28

Positioning (getting the right angle)

You can move your camera around to find the perfect angle for your screenshot. You do this by holding down the left mouse button and then moving your mouse around.

You can play with your middle mouse wheel to scroll in close or pan out really far.

Day Time Pictures (find the light)

These two screenshots were taken at the same time of day and at the same location. The only difference was the direction I was facing. In the first picture I was facing the sun and the screenshot turned out much brighter than the second picture where I was not facing the sun.

Another factor in determining the quality of your screenshots is the time of day you take your pictures. The good picture above was taken in the Afternoon and it turned out really well. Compare this picture taken at the same location but instead of the Afternoon I took this shot at Gloaming.

You can tell what time of day it is by hovering your cursor over the time icon on your mini map. During the day the icon will look like a yellow sun and during the evening hours it will look like a moon.

It can sometimes be frustrating when you are ready to take a screenshot but the time of day in Lotro is not cooperating. (Believe me I know!) Knowing how long you will have to wait until the right time of day can be very helpful. A Lotro 24 hour cycle takes a little over 3 hours in real time. Here is a handy guide showing you how long each cycle lasts in real time.

Total Time	Cycle	Length in minutes
Day lasts 1 hour 42 minutes 20 seconds	Dawn	9:32
	Morning	28:42
	Noon	17:47
	Afternoon	27:58
	Dusk	18:31
Night lasts 1 hour 23 minutes 40 seconds	Gloaming	9:30
	Evening	27:59
	Midnight	8:59
	Late Watches	19:1
	Foredawn	18:11

Night Time Pictures

There may be times when you want to take screenshots at night. It’s a little bit more tricky for night time photos to come out well but have hope, it can be done!

The concept is the same as Day time photo taking, you have to find the light. What light? It’s in the middle of the night! During the night time hours it’s all about artificial lighting. Every character has a built in lantern. You can activate your lantern during night time hours by hitting Alt + F10. Hitting it once will cause a high beam of light to illuminate around your character. Hitting Alt + F10 a second time will put your lantern on Low settings and hitting Alt + F10 a third time will turn it off. (see pictures below)

Cool huh? But wait… we can do better. Using your lantern at night is definitely better than not using it but standing out in the open causes your lantern to illuminate your character a bit oddly. Wait! What’s that over there? *Devonna turns to see a beautiful gazebo*

F10 works so much better if you use it inside. Take a look now at the lighting in my screenshot taken inside that gazebo using my Alt + F10 Lantern.

Perfect!

Make Your Subject Stand Out (no boring screenshots)

Choose a good background. A good background should be simple so the subject stands out easily. Make sure there are no distracting elements like poles or random people. What’s that coming out of my head?

Use the Rule of Thirds. Imagine putting a grid on top of your screenshot so that it’s broken down into thirds (both horizontally and vertically) so that you have 9 parts. The main focal points of your screenshot should be where  the lines cross around the center square. Focal points are the areas of interest in a picture. If you are taking a portrait, the obvious area of interest is your character’s eyes. If you are taking a landscape it could be a tree in the foreground.

Use emotes. Don’t just stand there doing nothing. That’s a bit boring to look at. Bring your character to life by trying out different emotes. You can see a list of all the emotes your character can use by clicking on the chat bubble to the left of the chat line and picking “emotes” from the menu.

While doing an emote take a lot of screenshots. You can get some really interesting poses by capturing the different movement parts of an emote. You can always delete the unused ones later.

And that’s the end of my tutorial. I hope you have found it helpful 🙂

*hugs*
Devonna

*Update 1/28/12*
A few more excellent tips to consider. Thank you Kaelin, Queen of Barad Gúlaran 🙂

“As an experienced screenshotter myself, a couple tips I follow:

• I turn landscape draw distance to the max and lower animation detail. It’s a picture, not a movie, so I don’t care if my sword-swings are jerky. And landscape draw distance lets all the hazy mountains and trees far-off show up. Don’t be shy, though. Screenshots don’t move so if you’re at 5 FPS with everything running ultra-high, you’ll live. Turn it back down to ultra-low when you go raiding.
• In the UI, also turn off all the floaty decorations like quest and shop icons, and also chat bubbles and floaty numbers.
• In combat, turn off auto-target, show target’s vitals, and selection direction indicator. I think that’s what they’re called. This lets you take combat shots without all the stuff going on. You just have to hit esc to deselect your target after your animation starts.
• Put your emotes on shortcut keys so you can flit about with the UI turned off. I think you do this by typing something like “/shortcut 1 /dance” and then you’ll dance if you press 1.
• If you use the default LOTRO screenshot-taker, it starts to lag when the folder is full of pictures, because it counts them all every time to find out what to number the new one. So, you should move the pictures out of that folder periodically to prevent terrible horrible lag.
• Lastly, THE most important tip to taking a good screenshot is to TAKE LOTS OF SCREENSHOTS. Tons and tons. If I made a 20 panel comic then I probably have around 600+ screenshots I’m working from.”