#screencap tutorial

first up, you’re going to need one program to get started, and that’s quicktime player in its fully-licensed form. how you go about procuring that is (ahem) entirely up to you. here’s a totally unrelated link.

I also use photoshop cs6 and adobe bridge, especially the former for its automated scripts that’ll help a little ways down the line, but by the end of this process you’ll have folders full of screenshots for you to import or copy/paste into whatever your usual programs are - whatever works.

the other thing you’ll need is footage that’s compatible with quicktime player. handbrake is a free video converter tool that will let you convert footage into a wide variety of formats with minimal or no compression, depending on your settings.

once you have your footage (and if you have video editing software you can make your life even easier by clipping down episodes/movies to just have the shots that your character of choice are in), open up quicktime and hit File> Open File...

once the footage is open in it, go to File> Export... and you’ll get a window that will allow you to choose where to save the exported screencaps, make a folder for them to go into there, and what to name the sequence of images as. I usually just use the episode name or number, but you can make it just about anything.

under Export: in this window will be a dropdown menu of different export options, the one we want is Movie to Image Sequence. once selected, hit Options to the right of it and adjust your settings: image format, frames per second, and another options menu to adjust image quality depending on your format.

I export my images as pngs, and usually at 2 frames per second since that tends to capture the main movements of animation without leaving too many inbetweens. this’ll absolutely vary depending on your footage, so have fun tweaking it ‘til you’ve got the amount you want!

once you’ve got your settings set and your names named, just hit Save, and watch the progress bar go. or not. take advantage of this time not being spent painstakingly scrubbing through footage and learn carpentry or something! depending on your computer’s cpu this may be a more demanding task that takes up some processing power for a few minutes, so remember to stretch and drink some water and use the bathroom if you’ve been holding it, you rascal.

once it’s done, you can admire your folder full of screencaps, and then realize that you’ve got some sorting to do. as I said before I use Adobe Bridge for its sorting capabilities and optional large preview panel that lets me quickly click through what images I really want to save after I’ve shift+clicked and weeded out the ones that don’t have my muse in them. this is gonna be the longest part of the process, but in my experience is still So Much Faster than how I used to do it. your mileage may vary.

once you’ve got the choicest of screencaps all laid out, it’s time to grab your image editing software and throw those bad boys in there, cropping with the wild abandon of a person gone mad with iconing power.

I like using photoshop for this because if you just go to File>Scripts>Load Files Into Stack... you can select Use:Files or Use:Folder and either shift+click or just click the whole folder and photoshop will load all of the images into layers within a single psd, which you can then save and edit to your heart’s content instead of having to open each file manually. be advised that there is an upward limit on how many screencaps photoshop can load in layers - this is why I weed them out before I try to make the psd.

for extra automation, you can save all of your newly-cropped images in another folder, load those files into a stack, and then put all the layers in a photoshop folder and drag+drop them over into your icon psd window so they can instantly be about 75% fancier, and then save them out one layer at a time from there.

To start with, you’re going to want to start with a high definition screencap.Here are some sites that I use:http://captoit.flaunt.nu/http://www.homeofthenutty.com/http://kissthemgoodbye.net/http://screencapped.net/http://thetvshows.us/

Then you want to crop your screencap. I cropped it 540px by 300px.This is a good post to know what dimensions to use for different edits.

Then you should sharpen your imagine. You can use whatever sharpening setting you want but I just use Filter → Sharpen → Sharpen

Next, you need to apply some adjustment layer curves and brightening filters. You can use a base psd or just some filters, whatever floats your boat.In this instance, I used:

All these are for this imagine specially so you’ll have to adjust it for you image and to your liking!

This is what mine looks like at this point:

All of this was pretty basic and I use some variation of this as a starter for all my edits. Now I’ll get into the more specific editing for the each screencaps on top.

For:

This has one has very little colour and is a nice way to get a more even-looking set because you’re bringing all your caps to the a similar tone.

You need to create a Hues/Saturation adjustment layer where you change the saturation to -50 for all your colours except for your reds (and master!). So change yellows, greens, cyans, blues and magentas to -50 saturation. This will cut down your vibrance. Like so:

If you want even less colour you can reduce the saturation even lower for the greens, cyans, blues and magentas. I recommend keeping the reds and yellows at their current levels or else the skin of your characters will have no colour.

This is how your imagine will look if you take your greens, cyans, blues and magentas saturation to -100.

That’s pretty much it. Nothing complicated, one adjustment and you’re done!

For:

This one is vibrant and bold and so much fun to play around with!Okay this one need a few more layers and the setting won’t be as universal as the previous ones.

Once you’ve done this first part (sharpening & brightening) you need to see what the prominent colours in the cap are. For this cap, I can see the background already has green and cyan so I want to accentuate that. I do that by using Vibrance, Hue and Selective Colour adjustment layer(s).

First I use a Vibrance layer:

Then Selective Colour layer:

Then I bring down the reds by using a Hue layer because the character’s skin is very bright red in this scene and I don’t want it to be overpowering. My settings are:

Then I increase the vibrance to make the imagine more colourful:

Then make another Selective Colour layer and adjust it to your liking:

And you’re imagine should look like mine:

Now, I just want to say that these exact settings will most likely not work for all green/cyan scenes. You will need to tweak it a little but it shouldn’t be so difficult.For other colours just use a different colour while using the Selective Colours layer. Also some scenes will inherently be more or less vibrant than the one I used so please adjust your Vibrance layers accordingly.

Part one: Cropping and Sharpening

Step One: Find the screencap(s) you want to edit

I recommend using these sites...

screencapped.net 

homeofthenutty.com 

kissthemgoodbye.net 

Or you can just google "[name of show] screencaps gallery"

I’m using this screencap:

Step Two: Cropping If you're doing one screencap per row you'll want the width to be 540px, and if you have more two screencaps in a row in your post you'll want the width to be 268px. If you want to use the old Tumblr dimensions, it's 500px and 245px. The height can be whatever you want. If it’s a lot of screencaps in the set and in rows of two, I usually do something like 150px by 268px, and if it’s one in each row I usually do 300px by 540px. But that’s just me!

Step Three: Sharpening Go to the filter tab at the top, and under sharpening you'll see "smart sharpen" which you should click. The settings I use are: Amount: 123 Radius: 1.0 Reduce noise: 10

Part Two: Coloring

Step Four: Adjustment Layers 

Next, you'll add adjustment layers. I use these settings, in order of bottom to top:

Curves: Input: 74 Output: 126  

Brightness/Contrast: Brightness: 15 Contrast: 20

Exposure: Exposure: 0.00 Offset: -0.0250 Gamma correction: 1.00

Levels: 10 1.00 245

Selective Color: Reds cyan: -25 magenta: 0 yellow: +15 black: 0

Yellows cyan: -25 magenta: 0 yellow: +15 black: 0

Color balance: Shadows Cyan/Red: +15 Magenta/Green: -5 Yellow/Blue: -5  

Midtones Cyan/Red: -15 Magenta/Green: 0 Yellow/Blue: 0  

Highlights Cyan/Red: -15 Magenta/Green: 0 Yellow/Blue: +5

Hue/Saturation: Hue: 0 Saturation: +25 Lightness: 0

Part Three: Coloring With Brush Tool

Step Five: Color Hair

This step shows how to make hair more colorful.

Make a new layer 

Set that layer to "soft light" 

Select the brush tool 

Choose a color you want to use. I'm using #ffc322 

Color over the hair with the brush

Step Six: Color Eyes

Make a new layer 

Set that layer to "soft light" 

Choose a color you want to use. I'm using #b66c0e 

Color over the pupils with the brush.

Step Seven: Color Lips

Make a new layer 

Set that layer to "soft light" 

Choose a color you want to use. I'm using #ff577b 

Color over the lips with the paint brush.

Part Four: Saving

Step Eight: Save As Now all you have to do is go to File > save as > and save it wherever you want! 😃 I like to save images as PNGs because it preserves the quality more than a JPEG does.

Here is the PSD for the coloring