Danbooru

Uploading cropped screenshots

Posted under General

Some artists release videos of themselves illustrating a picture and do not release the finished work on their associated image sharing accounts. In such a case would it be permissible to upload an image taken from the video and then use the video link as source?

For instance this illustration of Max by artist #96416.

They have a photo of their painting hosted on DeviantArt however it is of unsuitable quality.

By cropping a screenshot I believe I can derive a better quality image which would be suitable for inclusion in this gallery.

So, any thoughts on this concept? I think some guidelines could be fleshed out; for example, what sort of software is desirable for taking screenshots of videos and for cropping and exporting the final image for upload. In my case I simply made a screenshot in mpv and cropped using GIMP.

For anyone interested in this idea I highly recommend using YouTube-DL for getting source videos. It will download at the highest available resolution and works on essentially every video website

Okay, I will fool around tomorrow with different programs for extracting the highest quality screenshot with least artifacts. The rest should be easy as cropping and exporting to PNG in GIMP I assume.

Nonetheless I'd like to hear if anyone has anything to add. I think perhaps this method of sourcing images warrants a new tag given that screencap appears limited to anime only. Such a tag would be useful for maintaining that these images are made with good methods and for checking back on them to see if the artist has uploaded the work elsewhere. That's something I'd probably be compulsive over.

Just a note to set the source of the post to the video or a description/title thereof instead of leaving it blank. Some people seem to think that the Source field must be a link to an image, but it doesn't.

Mmmmm.... Hmm. I'm not really sure how to either. I'd call it "video_screencap" in case it isn't from the artist themselves either.

Was considering screencap be moved to something like "anime_screencap" but then that's a little less intuitive.

☆♪ said:

Bumping to see if we can get a tag for posts like this, for reasons chinatsu (sweetpea) mentioned above. I'm not sure what a good name for it would be. "artist_video_screencap"? Doesn't really flow off the tongue. Other ideas?

Not ideal but I changed the posts to have this tag. Can be changed easily later.

provence said:

Is a new tag really necessary? Doesn't photoshop suffice? Because is there actually a larger amount of such images floating around here?

This discussion is about the destinction between the unavoidable minimal modifications from transferring an image from one medium (video) to another (still image) and the - basically unnecessary - modifications mentioned in the photoshop wiki.

☆♪ said:

Had another idea for a tag name: "video_crop" - technically, not all of them would have to be cropped, but I think it gets the point across sort of intuitively and doesn't sound too awkward.

This sounds good. I think the next question is - should the wiki page be used to explain the best way to perform a video crop or simply what the concept is?

chinatsu_(sweetpea) said:

This sounds good. I think the next question is - should the wiki page be used to explain the best way to perform a video crop or simply what the concept is?

I guess both could be added; or in other words: If you explain what the best way is, then the concept probably gets explained at the same time.

chinatsu_(sweetpea) said:

Chalked up a wiki at video crop, sorry if it's terrible. Feel free to revise it.

I think @CodeKyuubi can add some information about captured streams.

I think I've only posted an image from a stream once, and it was post #2441368 (I found his streams very educational). It's not particularly my area of expertise, that lies with scans and their subsequent cleaning in Photoshop.

Streams are much trickier to get higher quality screenshots of. Most artists wouldn't bother posting videos of entire streams on YouTube and I'm not sure if there are websites other than Twitch that store temporary archives of streams. And even if they store them, it's still a pain in the ass to download from those websites.

And that's not even getting into taking screencaps of live streams.

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