So why is it ...

[Sir Puma]

that everyone else's screen shots look kick butt, including the straight up freeware type but mine look like poor cartoons. For example this shot.



Is it just a difference between FS2004 and FSX? Are their special settings that should be tweaked? I might be getting FSX after the holidays but till then I'm stuck with ugly crap. I have the SRTM installed for all of the US and Western Europe and was hoping that would help make the backgrounds look better, but it all looks like a bad cartoon image. Is it that the image is .jpg? Is there a better format?

I would like to be able to create awesome screen shots like everyone else.

Edit*
Here are my graphics settings.

(High Res)
http://i561.photobucket.com/albums/ss56 ... sHiRes.jpg

[skoker]

Wee all how hundreds of addons...

[Sir Puma]

As an example, here is the default 747-400 at KBFI during a beautiful sunny summer winter day and summer day.
Winter


Summer

[Sir Puma]

This is the same summer image with a little help from PSP7.

[olderndirt]

The common problem, regardless of equipment and/or technique, is what happens when you compress your 3MB .bmp shot down to 155kb.jpg to meet forum requirements.

[BrandonF]

It would probably help if you didn't use the default 747 in your screenshot, as it is modeled extremely poorly.

[Sir Puma]

That's one of the reasons I want to get FSX, way better graphics.

[Hagar]

The common problem, regardless of equipment and/or technique, is what happens when you compress your 3MB .bmp shot down to 155kb.jpg to meet forum requirements.

Precisely. Your shots include graphics intensive scenery which requires a lot of compression to meet the forum limit. Try a few shots in different locations to compare the amount of compression you need. Perhaps try zooming out a little. Some colours are more graphics intensive than others.

[Souichiro]

ADDONS ADDONS AND ADDONS!

Holger Sandmann's stuff
Fsskyworld
Many other things
http://205.252.250.26/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaB ... 1116250697

have a look there! and Good luck

[jnc1]

In a word - Atmosphere

Add some - Add some Cloud layers,Try different times of day, reduce the visibility settings.

All these will add to a screenshot without a single addon in site.

Treat a screenshot as you would if you were taking a photograph.

[olderndirt]

As someone else said, the sky's your friend.  Try to use more of that in your backgrounds.  Terrain as background is a killer on .jpeg quality.

[Sir Puma]

[quote]Precisely. Your shots include graphics intensive scenery which requires a lot of compression to meet the forum limit. Try a few shots in different locations to compare the amount of compression you need. Perhaps try zooming out a little. Some colours are more graphics intensive than others.

[Hagar]

The difference in those two images is that one is larger so you can actually read all the settings.

As I said earlier,

[Sir_Crashalot]

That's one of the reasons I want to get FSX, way better graphics.

Excuse me? I think I can put up a FS9 screenshot better than the average FSX user. It has nothing to do with using FS9 or FSX (besides some water effects), it's all in the tweaking and the use of the right add-ons.

Carlo (hardcore FS9 user)

[Sir Puma]

I am discovering the add ons.  wholly moley. I got a deal for better clouds, light bloom and runway lights as well as a kick butt KPWT where I usually fly out of. I also got but haven't installed yet the FSX texture package for FS2004

I'm not sure what happened, perhaps photobucket messed with the picture, but on my system it's 2050x1036 :-/ after downloading it I see it's 1024. Very annoying.

Now that I have some kick butt effects and scenery, I need to find some kick butt models to work with.