Capping: How-to
I thought it would be a good idea to post some tips on screencapping. I'm no expert, but if it can help out :)If you have any tips you think might be helpful, please send them my way and I'll add them here (with link credit, of course)
• For fanart & layouts you need large clear caps, so your best bet is to cap from DVD's (using programs like PowerDVD and WinDVD). You can also cap from tapes and downloaded files, but the quality is generally not as good as DVDs.
• I always find it good to make lots of caps, even if it means deleting quite a few afterwards, just to make sure you get the best shots of each scene.
• You don't want to make your caps too dark or too light. Buffy and Angel are shows that mostly take place at night or in dark places and I've noticed many people tend to lighten their caps too much, making them look washed out, which isn't good.
• If you want to make your caps crisp and sharp, you can use the sharpen tool, but then again, go easy with it, you don't want to make people look like they have herpes!
• Good caps are faily big, but don't make them too big, especially if the copy of the episode you have isn't top quality!
• Fight scenes - or scenes with a lot of moment are particularly tricky to cap. When I have trouble, I play the scene image by image or use the 'pause' button.
• I find the best format for caps is .jpg - although you don't want to compress them too much, they'll just look ugly. .gif reduces the number of colors and .png are just way too big for what we need!
• Thumbnails. When I first started having galleries, I use to make all the thumbnails by hand, until I discovered nifty little thubmnailmakers. I use EasyThumbnails, but many free little programs exit. They're tiny and functional and save so much time!
