Forum:Guide, the art of taking weapon screen shot (PC only)

First of, this guide applies to the PC only. Sorry for the console users, but you decided to get borderlands for the inferior system (joke, let's not war please).

Step1: Acquire screen shot
In-game, open your inventory, right click on your weapon/shield/mod/grenade, select "take screenshot".

Exit borderlands

Go to your. The location of the "Documents" folder may vary according to system. In any case DO NOT go to, it's not there!

Done right? Wrong.

Step2: Make a pretty crop
If you actually open any of your screenshots, you'll notice that there is about a quarter of the weapon's size worth of transparent border. WTF?

There is a VERY EASY - NO WORK INVOLVED way to solve this problem. First, download Image Magick command line, and install it. Don't groan, I'm not even going to make you open the program.

Open a command prompt in your screenshot directory, and type:

FOR %F IN (*) DO convert -trim +repage "%F" "%F"

That's it. No, seriously. You're done. Don't be afraid of the command line, it's real easy. This is the result:

Pretty sweet huh?

Optional step 3 for anal users: png optimization
If you're anal like me, then you don't like submitting stuff that's not optimized. I personally just make a single pass of Ken Silverman's PNGOUT. Just in case you don't know, Ken Silverman is the god who built duke3d's graphic engine. He also did other cool stuff like one of the first fully voxelated render engine. Anyways, back on track, just download pngout, and run.

FOR %F IN (*) DO pngout "%F"

That's it. Finished. Your PNGs now take up about 10% less space. Ready for upload!

Conclusion
I hope this helps. I think we are wasting a lot of real internet real estate here on the borderlands wiki, and I think it was time somebody did something about it! :)

Anyways, this being a wiki and everything, I of course give the guide to the community so they can do whatever they want to it (contribute, I hope). Experience, however, has shown that the best guides are the most concise.

Happypal 08:55, February 23, 2011 (UTC) 