Your screenshots are amazing and beautiful! I’m always impressed by your visual storytelling! I’m just incredibly curious about how you do them! What program or mod do you use? And do you do commissions? Thank you and keep up the lovely work! 💚
Aww, thank you so much, that’s very kind of you!
The only things I really use are my NVIDIA overlay (the base graphics of FFXIV is very grey and fiddling with the gamma only gets me so far, so I use the overlay for a tiny bit of color saturation for my regular gameplay), some preset shaders via GShade (which is...basically exactly like the NVIDIA overlay), and for some more complicated ideas (or wanting to do something ship-themed for Synnove and Aymeric), and CMTools. CMTools is basically where I draw the line in terms of modding--it uses strictly in-game assets and allows for manipulation of the in-game models, and that’s what I’m perfectly content with. I do not use anything related to Textools. Very rarely I may do some color touch-ups in Photopea (basically a free in-browser Photoshop dupe) or if I want to a complicated edit like I did a few times with FebHyurary.
Otherwise, it’s just /gpose! I’ve got plenty of screenshots where it’s just one of the base gpose filters (Bright 4 is the one I usually end up using) and a standard emote (possibly with the addition of a different expression, which can really change up the feel of an emote!) frozen at just the right moment. There’s typically a lot of factors I try to pay attention to when taking a screenshot or putting together a photoset: framing; lighting (each zone’s lighting is a little different and can be further affected by the weather and time of day, so a screenshot taken in the early morning in Mist can look radically different at noon and then sunset); camera angles (great for making something appear more dynamic, but also especially useful when posing the character models with CMTools and you can’t get a damn elbow to un-jankify...very careful framing and angling can hide a lot of sins); zoom (related to camera angles, really, but deserves a mention with how much I love a good closeup of my gal’s gorgeous face); and straight up cropping a shot to a smaller size to better focus on the scenery or the character or fix up the framing or even just because something smaller is less likely to get compressed to hell by tumblr. XD
This stuff just...takes a lot of practice, honestly, and figuring out what I liked in my screenshots, and replicating what I liked seeing in other folks’ shots. I’ve been messing with gpose since I started playing in late 2016 and there’s tons of things I’m still learning and beginning to experiment with. Hell, some of my favorite screenshots were happy accidents rather than anything meticulously planned!
I don’t do commissions, no; taking screenshots in FFXIV is strictly for my own fun, either spontaneously while playing the game or when I’ve got a specific idea. It’s admittedly a very nice bonus that other folks like what I put together, too! :)
Thank you again for the kind words! ♥
