User:Rvngt/Composition

Sometimes, just cropping the picture to your character just doesn't cut it--that, and learn how to take advantage of angles to get that fancy vibe.

Rule of thirds
Since this is one of the principle rules in design (photography, art, etc.), I'm just going to quote Wikipedia since most people know about this anyway. However, it is still very important to consider while editing your screenshots.

Read more about Rule of thirds on Wikipedia [here]. To the right: This image shows an example of the lack of rule of thirds, and therefore the lack of even balance. The blue lines represent objects of interest, although they don't absolutely have to be divided exactly among the white lines, they should at least evenly space out from each other. Another thing you should avoid is having your character's head right in the center.

Wide orientation
Making things widescreen is cool. It gives your shot a cinematic feel (especially after all that editing), and you have more horizontal space to work with. There's really not much to talk about in terms of making it wider, all you have to do is go to Image > Canvas size... and increase the width value. Example of a well balanced shot, cropped to a wide orientation and tweaked with a slight rotation. The result after being post-processed with a variety of effects (taught in the other tutorials).

Angles
There's no strict rule for using rotation, but it is commonly used when there's action or a sense of movement. Before you attempt you use free trasnform to rotate your picture, which you can't anyway, you must make it so the layer of your screenshot isn't labeled Background because you can't perform transforming on those. Right click on the Background layer then hit Layer from background. Just OK when the new screen comes up when asked to name it. Now you are free to do any free transforming by hitting CTRL+T. NOTE: After hitting enter to accept the free transform, your picture will get resampled and aliasing will start popping up. It's advised you downsize (Image > Image size..) the picture a bit after transforming to try to get rid of the aliased edges.