How to make high quality screen grabs?

[Peter Wiggins]

https://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

Peter

Free Motion Templates

https://www.peterwiggins.com

[Matthew London]

Sorry,

My post should have said “How to make high quality stills from video”.

I need to export stills from video and then process them in some way to look better, not just make a screen grab.

[Bryce Whiteside]

Pricy solution in Photoshop:
Genuine Fractals Print Pro 4.1and Nik Sharpener Pro 2.0 allow photographers to get high-quality enlargements and achieve optimal sharpness in any image for specific printers and specific viewing distances.

Standard alone moderately priced application:
BenVista Products

A slightly dated resource for different image enhancement and resizing but some are Windows only:
The Plugin Site Poll 2003

HTH,
Bryce Whiteside

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Mac OS X 10.4.5 QuickTime Pro 7.0.4
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion
After Effects 6.5

[Matthew London]

Someone on the Apple Discussion forum gave me this excellent tip:

PhotoZoom Pro
https://www.benvista.com

Supposed to do a much better job at uprezzing than Genuine Fractals.

Still open to other thoughts.

thanks for your help.

[David Roth weiss]

Hey there m!!! Look no further. Good news for you and everyone else here too, another Cow member and I are in the process of starting a new business entity creating high-quality, hi-res, print resolution stills from video using our proprietary software.

I can’t divlulge too much now, however, if you send me two 12-frame video clips and indicate the precise frame you would most prefer on each clip, I will gladly forward two samples of our work for you to evaluate. The samples will me watermarked, however, if you like them, as I’m certain you will, we’ll be happy to let you have clean versions of those stills for free when you submit your first order. Feel free to contact me for more info at “drw at drwfilms dot com”. I look forward to hearing from you.

DRW

[David Roth weiss]

Try the demo of PhotoZoom Pro fro yourself. I thought it added terrible artifacts and fringing.

[Alexander Gao]

forgive me if I’m being really stupid, but how come this can’t be done with footage, say, in a filmstrip?

Alexander Gao

“When the revolution happens, I’ll be leading it.”

[Scott Thomas]

Back in December `05, I wrote this… (I was told to save it)

Name: Scottgfx
Date: Dec 19, 2005 at 2:38:09 am
Subject: Re: Exporting stills at print resolution

There are a few things to keep in mind. SD video has a different pixel aspect than what a printer is going to need. When I have to take video captures and print them, I have a fairly long process that has to be done in a set order.

1. Take your video capture into Photoshop.
2. Determine if the image NEEDS to be de interlaced, (i.e. Is there motion in the frame?)
If the image has no interlace fringing from motion, there is no need to deinterlace
3. If deinterlacing must be done, it must be done before anything else is done.
Make a copy of the image layer so that you have two identical layers. On the top layer, choose Filter-Deinterlace-Upper Field. On the bottom layer, use the same filter but choose Lower Field. Take the top layers opacity to 50%. As long as there wasn’t too much motion you should have a much cleaner looking frame.
4. If random noise from the camera must be overcome, and there wasn’t too much motion. You can pick extra frame captures adjacent to the first, run the same deinterlace process as above and mix them into the original document. (I’ve done five or six frames together to reduce microwave feed noise with reasonable results.)
5. Now we need to correct pixel aspect. A 720×486 frame is simply scaled to 720×540. With DV footage, I add 6 pixels to the hight of the image with the canvas tool and then do the scale to 540.
6. I usually scale up the image to it’s final print size x 300 or 400 dpi and attempt some more processing.
7. The Median filter is helpful for reducing noise sometimes. Not too much.
8. Unshape Mask can sometimes get back some lost detail.
9. Working in LAB color space sometimes is useful for softening the chroma without affecting the detail.

The main thing is, don’t do it unless you have to. If it’s a video shoot that is staged, you should consider having a still camera on hand for such future needs. If you must use a video capture, scale up the image as little as you have to.

I had to get a ton of video captures preped for our annual Hurricane Guide. I had somewhere over 50 video captures that went into the magazine. I built a Photoshop action that did most of the steps above and also cropped enough of the image to get rid of the blanking. Thankfully, none of the images were printed too large. Some looked pretty good, some looked like video.

==================================================

Also, in the same thread, someone else mentioned Genuine Fractals PrintPro…
A really neat plug-in that should be in your toolkit. It could be used in the above workflow.

[Bryce Whiteside]

A slightly more economical Photoshop plug-in solution from FredMiranda.com Stair Interpolation™ Pro which I think is $29.

He has other articles that deal with image sharpening.

I was in a hurry in my previous post and couldn’t remember of the top of my head if his plug-ins were for Windows Photoshop only or not — well yes, they are both for Windows and Mac OS X.

Inquiring minds…
Bryce Whiteside

Don’t worry Mr. B. I have a cunning plan…

PowerBook 1.67 Ghz ATI 9700 128 MB 2 GB
Mac OS X 10.4.5 QuickTime Pro 7.0.4
Final Cut Pro HD
DVD Studio Pro 3
Motion
After Effects 6.5

[David Roth weiss]

Scott,

No offense, but this is like comparing a bottle rocket with a space shuttle. Using proprietary software encorporating very sophiticated algorithms to blend information from several video frames, I am able to create extremely high quality, high resolution, printable still images at 1800×1200 or 1440×960 pixels (depending on original video quality) from 720×480 DV files. The days of printing thumbnail-size prints to hide artifacts and pixelation are a thing of the past. Your solution using PhotoShop color correction and sharpening is a great way to save money my creating something passable that may suffice in a bind, but, since we all spend our lives telling stories visually, passable just isn’t good enough. The difference is astounding.

Over the next few months you’ll hear all about it… Meanwhile, if you would like to see a sample, send me 12 frames of video at “drw at drwfilms dot com” and I’ll send you a watermarked trial print.

DRW