Guild Wars Screenshot Guide – Take Better Pictures

It’s time to put my degree in Photojournalism to good use. I will teach you how to become a master Guild Wars photographer. Just as there is more to photography than clicking a button, there’s more to screenshots than hitting the “Print Screen” key. I will enlighten you. With your new found skills, you will be able to impress your friends. Maybe you’ll make a fansite, maybe you’ll make a Guild Wars web game, or maybe you’ll decorate your desktop with your custom-made wallpapers. Knowledge is power my friends. Use it wisely.

Now yes, we’ll start at the beginning. If you want to take a picture in Guild Wars, you’ll need to hit the “Print Screen” key. Yet, this will not guarantee you a quality shot. First, you must learn the controls. Self-discipline is the first step to becoming a master. Accept that you do not control the world around you, but you can control yourself. You can change your perspective. Learn what powers you have on what you can see…

  • PRINT SCREEN = take a screenshot
  • SHIFT + PRINT SCREEN = screenshot with no interface
  • CONTROL + SHIFT + H = hide the interface

Those are the three modes of shooting pictures. Remember, your mouse controls the camera angle. Hold down the Right-Click button to orbit the camera around your body. Use the Mouse-Wheel button to zoom towards and away from your character. Click and hold the Mouse-Wheel button for precision zooming. Zoom all the way in for First-Person Perspective.

Viewing from the eyes of your character is important. Not only will it allow you to remove your character from the picture, but it will also increase your angle of view. You can get a better look at the sky while in First-Person Perspective. In this mode, while looking up, you can notice how the sky is essentially a dome. It forever hovers exactly over your head.

Guild Wars: 4x Anti-Aliasing
If you look at the left image, you can see the jaggies on the edges of Tank’s Face. 4x Anti-Aliasing smooths the image to make it appear more natural.

The Guild Wars client automatically triggers high-quality setting while taking a screenshot. That is why slower computers might notice a significant amount of lag while taking a picture. Yet, there is one other graphics setting to be aware of… Anti-Aliasing. Video Games are made up of pixels. Thousands or millions of tiny squares create the image that you are seeing. Yet, you cannot draw an angled line with a bunch of blocks. To resolve this problem, jagged edges are softened by Anti-Aliasing. While this feature is turned on, the game is rendering image data at a higher resolution. This improves the appearance of the image, but you might notice a significant performance hit. With Anti-Aliasing, you also might notice wacky problems in Windowed Mode.

4 thoughts on “Guild Wars Screenshot Guide – Take Better Pictures”

  1. Wow! Thanks, P! I’ve been doing both photography and in-game photography as well lately and this guide was SOOOOO INCREDIBLY USEFUL!!

  2. Nice article, Mike, and very timely, too! You know a lot of players will be taking pics of the Wintersday event, so this will be a really good help for all of us.

    The “turn off the interface” tip is key. Or, if you want to leave the interface on, for instance to show your skill bar, be sure to wait between shots so the screenshot file name fades. I’ve disappointed myself too many times wanting to show the interface and capture an action shot, only to see “This screenshot has been saved as file name such-and-such” in bright green across my “classic shot.” ;)

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