The Comparison At The End Really Highlights How Much Of An Impact The Angle And Composition Of A Screenshot Can Have - Tumblr Posts
How did you improve so much in a year at building and taking screenshots?! Forever in awe
hahah thank you so much! I'm so happy with my improvement - the answer is ~magic~
nah, really, it's just that when I started Lucky Girl back at the end of 2022, I knew absolutely none of the screenshot tricks - I only ever got ts4 as a way to tell the story, and hadn't played it at all in the years prior. I ended up trying to take screenshots in a game where I didn't even know how to work the teleport function - and you can tell, I fear.
I was also using another platform to share my story at the time, and a lot of the content there kinda looked the same - vanilla, screenshots taken with plumbobs on and the walls down etc. I wasn't using Tumblr so I didn't have any inspiration. Coming here really pushed me to be better and taught me a lot of tricks and new things to add to my game to make it look better - the short of it, is that I just really didn't know better, and I just wanted to write the story. The screenshots felt secondary. I look back and cringe tbh, but I distinctly remember not really bothering that much with them, and thinking that 'just okay' was good enough.
Since then I've learned so much!
The first was how to teleport, and use MCCC to get sims to do couple poses off the lot
I got TOOL and figured all of that stuff out - including to create the illusion of varying heights etc.
I added in more details to the sims, changed any hair and skin issues, and added in skin details galore
I use WW for posing whenever I need something a bit more complex
I got over my fear of having too much CC in my game and just got so much build/buy cc - this made it possible to create the kinds of houses and rooms I imagined in my head - also, experience building helped a lot. In the beginning I was so intimidated, and frankly, unable to make things looked good that I relied on builds from the gallery 90% of the time.
Weirdly, even though I studied film in college, I never applied my knowledge of composition to the screenshots - I just started doing that, and generally trying to think more cinematically.
I got more use to using photoshop to fix screenshots, mix them together and crop them to be more compositionally pleasing. I also did that tutorial about changing the BG of a scene - I do that as a last resort, but it really works.
RESHADE - this was the biggest one. That DOF really changed my screenshot game - there's a point in lucky girl where I started using it, and you can see the instant difference.
Lighting mods - I use sunblind, and I also use the ghibli replacement clouds. I have a few others also to fix the shadows and lighting in general
Being more intentional with poses. I got a bunch of new ones with more subtle expressions that I felt suited the tone of my story better. I think the exaggerated ones are super cute, but they always seemed too much for my story. I also got animations for even more natural movement in scenes. Sometimes I'll make my own, too, if I can't find exactly what I am looking for
The eye trick was a huge gamechanger - I use it almost every single shot, and truly couldn't live without it.
Relight is a recent addition to my game - I only figured out how to use it around the end of part 2 of Lucky Boy. I don't use it a lot, but it was great more some of the dramatically lit festival scenes, and whenever I want some lamplight on a character (Or to just balance out a dark part of the shot)
camera mods have helped me gain more control of my scenes, along with the CTRL 5/6/7/8/9 camera saving trick. I use this a lot too, especially when I need to characters to look at each other with the eye trick and they won't do it at the same time (recent example below)
All of that is basically how I did it! It was a whole process but I'm so pleased because I look at the old screenshots and just think, damn, I've come so far!
More examples of the same scenes redone, because it's fun
