Tutorial: how to turn your video game screenshots into art!

hi
 tonight's post is about turing those screenshots of your fave games into things nice enough for your wall!
and it dosn't use any expensive software! or a professional artist, just 10 minuets and some free software! :D

nice eh? (its my phone background! , yes im sad :L)

not quite as pretty

For  the example were not going to use skyrim (its far too pretty :P) so Im going to do a screenshot of a replay from a online match of  ' call of duty: modern warfare 3' as it isnt as pretty!
so the original

ugh  well not my desktop background!

step 1 : colour balance

i chose a slight red:to fit with the theme

step 2:  hue balance

colour balance normally make the colours very strong so i use hue balance to smooth it a little. but to retain the new colour

i made it slightly more muted

step 3: re-apply shadows

with many video games the models are simpler so on many places the shadows are not very strong so this stage strengthens the shadows and adds new ones.(e.g. easy too see on the helmet and gun, and the hand in the later photos)  (this is possibly the most time consuming stage, use a airbrush tool with a low opacity)

step 4: blackout nametag, crop image and add effects+ contrast

well you dont want a nametag across your pretty pic, or the HUD, so I crop these out and use copy and paste, the colour picker and a few other tools to smooth it out. I then used a translucent 'sparks' tool to add a small mussleflare and a smooth  translucent brush  to apply the red of the sights, watch and a small amount on the helm (the name blackout is quite tricky, i messed it up a little on the launchers side)

step 7: done: frame on the wall! 

looks as good as battlefield :P (kidding on for the BF effect lower contrast so its all grey :P)

thoughts, opinions? improvements, go to the comments below :D

also sorry for the lack of recent posts, im wating for a new camera cable!

-fuzz

p.s. if you do any yourself ill be happy to feature them on here!

(and below is some of my skyrim ones!)

and some others

*scary music*

skyrim is just too darn pretty :)