---

---

To begin with, open up your program of choice and select File > New. You will be shown a prompt upon doing so, asking for a height and width for your screenshot. This is entirely up to you, however I will be choosing a width of 1130 pixels, and a height of 400 pixels. This gives you enough space to work with. If you wish to work in colour, choose RGB as your colour mode, with an 8 bit or 16 bit colour scheme. The background contents can be whatever you choose as we'll be going over it anyway.


You will then be provided with your canvas of which you will be working on, so lets open up some screenshots and get them ready to be altered. I'll be using screenshots from a different server, so anything you see here is completely unrelated to anything you see in the server. So, using the location of the screenshots mentioned above go back to the top navigation bar, and do File > Open and select the screenshots you wish to alter. For them to open in order, select the last one, hold down shift and click the first one. You can hold down the Ctrl button to select different screenshots.


Now that we have the screenshots, we'll want to edit them. Click the first screenshot, with the Move tool located on the toolbar. This will allow us to take ahold of the screenshot we want and drag it into frame.


With the tool selected, you'll want to click and drag the image with the initially made canvas in the background, onto it. This will place it on the canvas and from there you'll be able to stretch or move the image.


With the image in place on the canvas, you can do a few things to make fix its positioning. If you wish to maintain the aspect ratio when moving it, ensure you hold down Shift while moving the corners, this will stop it looking stretched out, resulting in a poor quality screenshot. Alternatively you can do as I do, and move the original image around until you find a position that contains all of the appropriate items and players.


Now we have the image in place, we'll add the text. Open up the chatlog file (WARNING: If you leave the server and rejoin, the chatlog will be wiped so do this before rejoining another server) and find the appropriate lines of text for the time of roleplay. Copy them and go back into your program of choice, press T to select the text option and click on the screen. Then, do Ctrl + V to paste it in. It will show up odd and out of place, but we will edit it.


As you can see, it has created a new layer for the font. Ensure this is selected as well as the Text selection tool. Click the text anywhere and press Ctrl + A to select it all. Following on, move your cursor up to the bar where you can select fonts, font colours and font size as we will be using all of this.


First of all, we'll need a suitable font. I prefer Calibri but this is entirely personal choice, but for the use of screenshots I would recommend Calibri Regular as it is a lot more fitting. When altering screenshots, the font size I use is 16 pt as this is not too large, nor is it too small and allows you to view all of the text without any issues. Finally, we'll want to change Sharp to Smooth as this makes for a smoother text style.


You will notice that your font size has gone down, and your text fits better on the screen, but the font colour is hard to read. You will notice that when playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Multiplayer that the font has a black glow around it to prevent anything in the background making it hard to read, so we'll replicate this here. The effect they use is called stroke. So what you'll want to do, is go to the layers tab and right click the text layer. From here, go to the top and select Blending Options.


When in this option, find the Stroke feature and mark the little box beside it. Click inside the box and you'll be shown more options. My preferred stroke structures are a size of 3 px, this is a close match to the SA:MP default text style and will be easily readable. You should also note the colour to be black and the position of the stroke should be outside as anything else will look silly and ruin the screenshot. Back out and check your font.


You can now clearly read the font, but we still have some features left to implement. As you can see, the timestamp is still on the screenshots. This is easily removed by selecting it and deleting it with your backspace key. To make the lines line up without spacing underneath each other, go to the first letter of the line you wish to bump up and again, press the backspace key. From here, feel free to move your text around and place it in a more appropriate place.


You may have also noticed that when you type a /me or /do command in game, they will show in a purple text colour, so we will change any appropriate lines to that colour. To do so, highlight the text - again, pressing T to select the text selection tool and click on the text layer, highlight the line and move back to the top where we changed the font style and size.


Click the button shown in the screenshot above, and proceed to change the colour. The official hexidecimal colour used for SA:MP commands is #C2A2DA however I use [/b]#B400D5[/b]. Both will work well, but for arguments sake, we'll use the official colour. When in the colour selection tab, move to the lower right hand side of the box where you'll see some letters. In this case, we see FFFFFF. You should change this to the colour of your choice. As the regular player chat colour is white, we would use FFFFFF as the hexidecimal code.


Now, you are free to back out of the box and see your finished screenshot. If you wish to upload it to the forum of choice, go back to the top and click on File. Go to Export and finally, Save for Web. This will allow you to choose the format that your image is to be saved into, as simply saving it as a .psd file will not allow you to insert the picture.


There are a few extensions to consider, however as we are intending to save it at the highest quality we can, I would recommend saving it as a [/b]JPEG[/b] as this utilises all of the available colours in the spectrum that have been used on the image. Set the quality to high, the file to JPEG and finally go to the bottom and click Save.


When saved, you will want to upload it to a site such as Imgur. Once uploaded, right click the image and select Copy image address which will be what you put in between your img tags on the forum. If you find that your image is too wide, use the img width BB code tag. This will make it a bit smaller, but you shall not lose any ability to read the text.

---

---

---

---

I hope this was helpful, and if you have any questions feel free to leave them down below and I'll help out as much as I can!

You are my savior.

Or you can use PhotoScape instead, It's way easier and simple. but gg

This is just a guide for Photoshop if people don't know what PhotoScape is I don't know what it is!

This is a great guide, no more cut screens with different background annoying me to seven hells xD *coughs* ^^ this dude *coughs*