Are screencaps photos?

[wonderer]

Yes, it's the stupid question of the day!

So now I have shown myself up as a numpty I shall ask again. Are direct screencaps from video files considered the same as normal photos and be treated as such when editing or should they be approached differently?

I have a large amount of old hi8 and video8 tapes of my childhood that I have digitised and have taken some screencaps to try to bring out the best but any and all software I use seems to have a much smaller effect on them than standard jpgs. Whether it be elements or ai software it seems to treat screencaps differently for some reason and the changes are much less pronounced, often with no difference at all.

I have mentioned about the ai software aspect in the editing thread but wanted to ask the wider community if they treat video screencaps any differently to your standard shots. On a side note does saving screencaps as PNG files make any difference over jpg?

Cheers

 

[TheBigYin]

I vaguely remember from many years ago when I did a few bits of this, that the main thing that affected the quality of the output was the digitising card, and the format that the video was output into - I'd suggest trying to output the files into some form of lossless video stream in RGB colourspace and grab caps from that to see if it makes any difference.

Again, going from my unreliable memory, I was using video files that were only 8 or 10 bit colour depth ( ??? 4:2:2 yuv rings a bell from somewhere ??? ), so i'm thinking that may also have had an effect on what I could do in photoshop compared to a modern camera raw file...

I'll leave any further answers to people who've done this kind of thing in the last decade...

 

[Ham]

The main difference is the resolution. When you view an image on screen, the resolution is the same as from a 1 Megapixel camera, a still off an HD video recording is around the equivalent of a 4 Megapixel camera, if you are lucky (more likely much less). Any still from that is going to reflect the lack of data, there is less for the software to work with. Resampling to bigger image won't really improve matters much. JPG / PNG won't change that basic issue.

 

[Pound Coin]

A 'retina' screen may give higher screen grab resolutions. 4k or 5k.

However, if the original material is hi8 and video8, then the resolution is ve low to start with, so a higher resolution screen will be not important at all. As Ham says, absolute max of 1 Megapixel.

As for how you edit them, can you change the output file format of a screen grab? On a Mac they are saved as .png files. They can be edited like any other image file.