P.S. If you’re on my WoW server, I better not see you fishing around Blackwind Lake or it’s ON! You can have Lake Jorune.

I realize that aged parchment has to be yellowed or weathered in some way, but I would have steered clear of Bright! Gold! parchment and maybe gone for browner aging or the palest of yellows. The metal borders add to the Warcraft feel too, although they’re using something similar on the LOTRO main page and I’m not getting the same vibe.

If it was me, I’d be a little sensitive to the WoW-clone wisecracks and I’d make sure the look was unique enough so I could say, “what in the hell are you people talking about?”

Ten years ago, Tenarius, former Mud Druid, wrote a guide for nerfing games: The Mud Whimping Guidebook Page, Ruin your game by nerfing or wimping players.

Realize: I’m not saying Warcraft is ruined, not by a long shot — I’m saying human nature hasn’t changed in ten years.

Since this is an ancient document, I’ll translate some of the terms:

Mud – that’s a game, Multi User Dungeon. Our forefathers played these around a kitchen table before there was Ultima Online and EverQuest.

Immortals, Gods, Dungeon Masters and their ilk – those are the GMs! We still call them GMs! Weird.

Mobs – the monsters. We still call them mobs! Weird.

Trolls – players, (forum posters), who stir up trouble. We still have those too!!

Wiping – we think of wiping as a complete party or raid death. Back in the kitchen-table days, wiping was like quitting — a complete file wipe of player data.

Wimping (alternate spelling, Whimping) – NERFING. Looks like they sometimes called it nerfing also.

And reading further, I can see that we have had fanbois, QQers and The Poor with us always.

His conclusion about game balancing and the inevitable fallout is as valid today as it was back then in olden days:

Lastly, is it worth the cost? You are about to lose players and maybe an immortal or two. Is this what you want to occur? Are players worth anything to you? Will you GET more players in return for the ones you lost when the game playing public hears of what a great job of wimping you have done? If so have at it, but think… few people come to muds because they have heard of how great the balance is, most people come because they hear the gods make it a FUN place to play and that the people are friendly. Nerfing begets the antithesis of a friendly environment.

I read all this as: Nerfing is the slippery slope of last resort.

They knew that before we knew that.

Credits: I found Tenarius’ essay via this thread on the WoW Forums, thanks to Buzzkill, level 8 posting alt of the Windrunner realm.

You know the one … W T F.

A gaming nubling would see WTF about 23,904 times per gaming session, they NEED to know what we’re screaming at them!

And that reminded me of a real life story.

Some family holiday, maybe was Thanksgiving, dunno, but my extended family was in full force … brother, sister, their spouses, children, their in-laws and their children … and we get to talking about the venacular of txt messaging and the internet. My sibling’s sister-in-law asked what “p-own” means. (Actually, “pwn”, but she had only heard it, never seen it in print.)

My nephew (level 62 druid on another server because I don’t want him witnessing any Uncle Foton hate in the general chat channels) and I started laughing and explained what pwning is and how much we, personally, pwn. We would have further explained how much we’d pwn her if she ever dared step inside Warcraft, but she asked about other acronyms and we answered. (Don’t worry, we didn’t give away all the internet secrets.)

Let me briefly pause to explain that this woman has been a thorn in my side since the day I met her. I barely acknowledge her existence, and she mine, ever since a family tussle that we now refer to as “That First Communion Incident”. Now, I never miss an opportunity to passive-aggressively torment her. And it’s remarkably easy to do.

Anyways, she started going on about gaming and how borderline satanic, evil it is (y’know, blow me) with its speaking in tongues and all, and then she fake apologized for asking all those questions.

“No prob”, said me, “as long as you don’t ask what W T F is.”

My nephew snorted soda out of his nose.

“W T F?” asked she. (Didn’t I just tell her not to ask?)

I leaned in conspiratorially, “What. The. Fuck.” and took my leave.

Asked and answered, baby, asked and answered.

I can hardly wait ’til she asks about “mofo”.

The four steps of my quick juice job are: Correct the color, adjust brightness, boost the contrast, and sharpen.

Here again is the unaltered screenshot from World of Warcraft’s Blade’s Edge Mountains, our starting point:

Almost every editor, including the freebies, has an Auto Correct Color or some such function. Usually, the auto color correction is too harsh for game shots and with a lot of the freebies, there’s no adjustment slider or option to to take away some of the correction … ala Photoshop’s opacity slider. Trial and error, aka Edit » Undo, will be your friend here.

Using IrfanView as a sample intermediate editor, here’s IrfanView’s Auto Adjust Colors result (Image » Auto adjust colors):

Ack! Too much. Since we can’t back off the adjustment with opacity or a similar % adjustment, we’ll have to use individual color adjustments to reduce the Auto Color changes.

Image » Enhance colors, and using the blue slider, we remove some of the blue, down to about -80, and much of the native orange is restored. Color corrected!

Not every auto color correction will be so obvious. You might need to adjust the red and green channels also, or your editor might use cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Trial and error, don’t commit to a change until you’re satisfied, be ready to Edit » Undo, and don’t spend all afternoon fiddling with one screenshot. It’s just a screenshot, not a masterpiece.

Using the same Image » Enhance colors window, we can adjust Brightness similar to the Photoshop instructions. Once we’re satisfied with the Brightness, we can pump the colors a little by boosting the contrast to taste. (Photoshop uses a -100 to +100 scale for Brightness/Contrast; IrfanView uses a -255 to +255 scale for Brightness and -127 to +127 scale for Contrast.)

For this shot, I chose +3 for Brightness and +12 for Contrast:

The last step is sharpening. IrfanView lacks any subtlety in its sharpening tool (Image » Sharpen), however, I’m pleasantly surprised with its sharpening — seems ideal for screenshots, not too much or too little.

Here’s the final after saving as a Best Quality jpg file:

Very close to the Photoshop final, the standard by which all editors are judged. Here’s the Photoshop final again:

The IrfanView has some subtle greens visible, which I rather like, although the Photoshop version is closer to the actual game scenery.

Some Final Notes on Juicing Game Screenshots:

1. NONE of this applies to photographs. I’ve outlined one fast(er) and dirty method to pump up screenshots to impress your guildmates and e-friends. Photographs require a much different approach.

2. With every adjustment you make in an image editor, if it looks good to you, it’s the right choice.

3. How large a role does computer hardware play in producing brilliant screenshots? A minor one. Obviously, a newer video card can produce greater detail than an old, crusty one. Most of my screenshots were captured with an older (2 years ago technology) card and juiced with IranfanView, Paint Shop Pro, Nikon Capture or Photoshop. Punching your colors and sharpening can restore much of the detail lost with dated technology.

Additionally, a reasonably-calibrated monitor will show your eyes accurate colors and details. There are online tools and guides to help you reasonably calibrate your monitor to the proper gamma setting and all the etc. of colors.

4. It’s possible with the advanced editors to macro these steps (Photoshop action or Paint Shop Pro script, for example). However. In my experience, this is rarely a time saver, as inevitably a screenshot will need less color correction, or more brightness or a big contrast punch, and then I have to Undo and redo layer by layer anyways. Your experience may vary.

Now go forth, be fruitful and screenshot every corner of your virtual lands.

I use Photoshop, but the tweaks are easily translated to almost any other intermediate or advanced image editing software. I’ll explain exactly what my adjustments do so you can hunt around in your chosen program to do the same.

A caveat: Photoshop and other advanced editors (e.g. Paint Shop Pro) allow the use of layers to perform image adjustments. You can play around with your adjustments to get a desired effect and if worse comes to worse, you can delete the layer and try again. This isn’t possible with most intermediate-type editors (e.g. IrfanView). If you’re using an editor without layer-capability, try out your adjustments incrementally and Edit » Undo adjustments that don’t work well.

We’ll talk about IrfanView and other intermediate editors tomorrow, Photoshop/advanced editors today.

Here’s an example to work with, from World of Warcraft’s Blade’s Edge Mountains, a couple of dragonkin met their untimely deaths on the side of the mountain.

And here’s the juiced version of the same shot, after I applied my usual Photoshop adjustments.

This shot illustrates a common problem with game shots, and a difficult one to correct — a homogeneous color palette — in this case, orange. The original shot is exactly what I saw in game, but without the dynamic lighting and the sounds and the elite mob stomping around behind me, the shot “as is” doesn’t do the experience justice.

Open the shot in Photoshop and change the view to Fit Screen (or however your editor maximizes the shot on your monitor).

Our first task, color correction.

Create a new adjustment layer for Auto Color Correction (Layer » New Adjustment Layer » Levels …), and allow the editor to Auto correct the color levels.

Photoshop:

Ouch. That’s too much.

This is typical for Auto Color Correction of gaming screenshots, the adjustment is too harsh. We can step down the correction using the Opacity on the Adjustment Layer. Some screenshots I’ll adjust opacity to 25% or 10%, whatever looks good to you is the right choice. For this shot, about 50%-ish opacity looked appropriate.

The Photoshop opacity adjustment for the color correction:

Better. The shot doesn’t have an orange cast anymore, but it’s washed out and hazy.

Create a new adjustment layer for Brightness/Contrast, and play around with the brightness first until you’re satisfied. Don’t be concerned that the colors wash out even more after the brightness adjustment — we’ll fix that with the contrast next. Most screenies, I’ll boost the brightness to +5 on the Photoshop scale which runs from -100 to +100, with 0 as the original. If your shot is from a particularly dark corner of the virtual world, you may need to boost by +15, however, much more than that and the shot will look overmanipulated.

Conversely, if your shot is too bright, drop the brightness until the glare isn’t searing your eyeballs anymore. (Ya, I know. Duh.)

After we’re satisfied with the brightness adjustment (I chose +5 for this shot), adjust the Contrast by a little more than the brightness adjustment to remove the haze/washed out look. Usually, I’ll boost contrast by 4 or 5 more points than the brightness adjustment. This shot, I boosted contrast by +9.

(Note: If you lowered the brightness because the shot was too bright, adjust the contrast to about 4 or 5 units ABOVE the brightness adjustment. For example, if you adjusted brightness to -10, start with a contrast adjustment of -5 and move from there.)

The Brightness/Contrast layer:

Your goal with the Brightness/Contrast adjustments is to improve visibility of the shot’s main subject (brightness) and then punch the colors a little (contrast) to remove haze and improve the shot’s vibrance.

One last adjustment I typically make is a small, teeny, tiny bit of sharpening. Digital sharpening will make the details of your shot pop, but it’s very easy to overdo. Achtung, baby.

In Photoshop, collapse the layers, either with Layer » Merge Visible (this is a good habit to get into, Merging Visible rather than Flattening) or Layer » Flatten Image. For screenshots, I use Photoshop’s Smart Sharpen. I have a separate sharpening plugin for photographs, but frankly that’s too much trouble for screenshots — the built-in sharpening filter is plenty.

Filter » Sharpen » Smart Sharpen, I use Basic Sharpening, 40% (on Photoshop’s 1% through 500% scale), a radius of 1 pixel, and Remove Gaussian Blur (that’s the default). Any more than that is overpowering for screenshots, in my experience. Here’s the result:

Other editors or other sharpening tools, select appropriate options to produce a delicate effect … low halo, low %s, small pixel radius, etc. As with everything else, if it looks good to you, it’s the right choice.

The last step is to File » Save As in a jpg format, with high quality settings (to reduce jpg artifacting), and you have a rocking good screenshot with just 4 adjustments. After some practice, you can perform the edits in less than two minutes per shot, including the save in jpg format.

If you’re a Photoshop or other advanced editor user, you’re dismissed. ( … and yes, this WILL be on the Final.)

IrfanView or other intermediate editor users, your adjustments are similar — correct the color, boost or decrease the brightness, adjust the contrast to remove haze, a little bit of sharpening to improve the detail, and Save As high-quality jpg file.

Tomorrow: A step by step IrfanView juice job on the same screenshot.

Loot the hound! (WoW Noob Lesson: After downing a core hound, the skinner needs an empty corpse to skin the primo leather off the dog.) Possible variations: Loot the damn hounds! Loot the fucking hounds! Crimony, how many times do we have to ask people to loot the goddamn hounds!?!?!?

Wait for sunders! (WoW Noob Lesson: The stackable warrior sunder reduces mob armor and builds a high amount of threat.) Possible variations: Fucking rogues, wait for sunders! *Sigh* Mages, wait for sunders! Warriors, we’re waiting for sunders.

We don’t really shout about those things anymore. Shame, used to be really hilarious.

Anyways, I was reminded of the old MC days when I skimmed through the new Raid Tips Guide posted on the Warcraft World site. If you’re new to raiding, this could be really useful, I suppose. Much of it is common sense, of course, which is never as common as advertised.

If I was new to Warcraft and I was reading through this guide, I would think, “What the crap, raiding sounds like a JOB and that guide reads like an EMPLOYEE MANUAL.”

And I would be right.