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Screenshot Quality Guideline: Image Quality
Appears in: General Guidelines
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At a glance
Required screenshots shouldn't be blurry, pixelated, or distorted.
General Guidelines
Quality issues with screenshots can make it difficult or impossible for moderators and downloaders to see your creation clearly. This is why correcting any issues is important. :) A few of the most commonly seen issues are:
This can be caused by several things: Enlarging screenshots, turning compression too high or quality too low when saving images in your graphics editor, and using image formats other than JPG. Your images can be up to 2560x1440 pixels, and 1.3 MB - larger images usually mean better quality.
Never enlarge or upscale images in Photoshop or another image editor. Not only does this not improve the image quality, it actually makes it much worse, since the program fills the new pixels with "junk" information. If your screenshots are too small, the best way to fix this is to retake the screenshots, using the in-game camera tools to get closer to what you're trying to show, or in the case of TS2, an external imaging program.
When using the in-game camera tool, zooming out too far with the mouse wheel can cause "fisheye" distortion. Images with fisheye distortion can be very difficult to view clearly and don't give a good representation of what downloaders will see in their game.
Taking pictures of the computer screen with a phone or other external camera not only causes distortion, colour problems, and reflections, it's also unnecessary! Using a good screenshotting program or the game's built-in camera is a must for all required pictures.
Struggling to take good in-game pics? Check out our Camera Controls tutorial to help sharpen your skills!
Struggling to take good in-game pics?
Check out our Camera Controls tutorial to help sharpen your skills!
The Sims 2 Guidelines, apply in addition to the above General ones.
Unlike the other games, in TS2 we strongly discourage using the in-game camera (C key). In TS2 it produces images which are usually too low-quality and far too small to be usable. Instead we recommend using Printscreen or a screenshotting program like FRAPS.
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Possible Assessments
Some or all of the required screenshots of this creation are pictures of a computer screen taken with an external camera, like a phone camera. To best show off your creation, please take all screenshots using your computer's built-in tools.
The required screenshots for your creation are very blurry or crunchy, which makes it impossible to see this creation.
The screenshots have a very heavy fisheye effect; this distortion makes it difficult to see this creation.
There are no image quality issues with the required screenshots. Nice!
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Examples
External camera
This image was taken with an external source, in this case, a cell phone. There are the tell-tale computer image lines that appear when this is done, as well as a reflection of the background in the uploader's location, which is very distracting.
Blurry
In this screenshot, the image was resized to be larger. This has caused the poster to become blurry, and therefore would not be acceptable as a required screenshot.
Fish-eye
When in live mode, if you hit the Tab button on your keyboard and zoom out, you get this 'fish-eye' effect. It really is quite distracting to the viewer and does not show off your work to its utmost potential.
Good example!
This is a good example of image quality because the image is crisp and clear, was not taken with an external camera, has not been resized to be larger, and there is no fish-eye effect! :)
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