How to Take Better Photos! - A Guide!

ZakYeen · October 5, 2019

Hey there! Welcome to my guide! I'm glad you're here! Today I'm gonna be showing how to take better photos, and try and at least prove to you that, you don't need a NASA super computer to take some amazing photos! So without further ado, let's crack on with it!

Disclaimer - I have been doing photography IRL for the last 6 years, so over time I've developed an eye for it. The more photos you take, the better you will become overtime. You're not gonna be taking amazing photos straight away, like everything else in life, it takes time, effort and patience!

Set up:

In this section I'm gonna go through how to setup steam and your game to take better photos, I'll explain everything as I go along!

1. Open up Steam, pretty simple huh?

2. Click "Steam" in the top right corner, and select "Settings"

3. Select "In-Game"

4. You want to click "Save an Uncompressed Copy" and make sure it's ticked (VERY IMPORTANT) and define a screenshots folder. Now whenever you take screenshots in game, they'll go here!

5. Open ETS2/ATS

6. Go to Graphic Settings

7. It's hard to tell you what to do exactly, but try to match these settings here as much as you, try maximize your quality as much as you can. You want to be trying to get as much quality at the lowest usable FPS as you can, the photo is gonna be still anyway, so massive FPS drops don't really matter

That's this section done!

The most important part about this guide is that you realize that photography is all about messing up and experimenting. Below, I have my settings for the in game camera, feel free to copy them!

I strongly advise that you play around with theses settings, that's what this guide is all about. Any pictures you take here will be sent to the screenshot folder you defined earlier. Just remember that! They will no longer show up in the steam library anymore (...or, will they?). Now I know there's still gonna be people out there saying, "Zak, I have a literal SPUD of a PC, how the hell can I take good shots?". To that I have one thing to say. It's about artistic representation, not how great your equipment is. My Ex used to boast how he had a Canon 80D, which was far superior to my Canon 1300D, but where he fell down is he didn't know how to use it, hence, I was still well capable of pulling off better shots than he was. To prove this, I'm gonna take two photos, one on my normal setup, the other with the absolute 0 setting, all graphics on their lowest possible settings!

It's all about angles, try zooming the whole way in and move around to get your subject fully in frame (on screen) and try that! Tilt the camera, go wild! Try copy how I set up those photos and use them in different scenes. Look at other photographers around TMP and see how they set up their shots, try copy them and give it your own twist or flair! The more shots you take, the more experience you're getting under your belt, and it the long run, the better you shots will become!

I really hope this guide helped you out! If it did, please feel free to drop a like and let me know what your opinions or tips are! Let's help each other out!

~ZakYeen