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How (and why) to take great screenshots in Gran Turismo 7
Gran Turismo 7 has one of the best photo mode suites on the market. We have a few reasons you should care, and some tips on how to take advantage of it.
Red Bull Capture Point is currently live! If you play Gran Turismo 7 or Horizon Forbidden West, you’ve got until October 30th, 2022 to take some stunning screenshots and get your submissions in. Details on how to enter can be found here.
Racing fans with an aesthetic eye, you have many reasons to rejoice. Gran Turismo 7 has one of the most fleshed out video game photo modes on the market. If you’ve ever combed through the game’s Showcase Page or checked out some of the Red Bull Capture Point submissions, you’ve probably seen some unbelievably well-framed car photos which flawlessly sell the feeling of movement.
In the spirit of Red Bull Capture Point, we reached out to racing sim fanatic and photo mode enthusiast, DriveThrough, to tell us about some of the things you can do in the absolutely picturesque title. Over his years as a content creator, he’s really zeroed in on what he looks for in a good shot, and has agreed to share a little bit of his thought process with us.
Night time Gran Turismo 7 shot by Drivethrough
© Sony Interactive Entertainment & Davin Cornelius
What can you do in Gran Turismo 7 photo mode?
“The photo mode is incredible,” says Drivethrough. “There's two main ways you can take photos: either in Scapes or in Race photos. There are a lot of games where you can take pictures of your car if you watch a replay after a race, but the Scape system in Gran Turismo 7 is so much more fantastic.”
Through Scapes, players are given a massive selection of locations within which to place their car and set up the exact shots that they want. Along with environments, budding visual artists can also choose from a ton of different effects, filters and masks to apply. Do you want to apply some effects to the background or others only to the car? That’s absolutely a go. You’re pretty much only limited by your own creativity.
“I don't even know how some of these guys do the things that they do. They'll get a full reflection of the car underneath, I guess they must find a wet patch of road or something but, I don't know, they get things really crisp and clear,” says Drivethrough about some of the shots he’s seen other GT7 players posting.
“I usually go for something a little realistic. A photo that I could take of a real car. Through experimentation and just messing with settings, I've actually come up with a few surprisingly cool shots that end up lit up and framed really well.”
How to take a good screenshot in Gran Turismo 7
Cool lighting effects in this GT7 shot from Drivethrough
© Sony Interactive Entertainment & Davin Cornelius
Step 1 - Pick what kind of photo you want
What is your subject? It’s one thing if something awesome happened during your last race, sending you running to the replay screen to try and capture it for eternity. But what about when you’re feeling creative and want to set something up with all the right conditions? The first thing you need to do is think about what sort of energy you want to capture.
“Choose whether you want to do a Scapes photo to capture or Race photo. If I want to take a photo of a car doing a cool drift, then I'll fire up a practice session, go do some drifts, and watch the replay and take some race photos of it, says DriveThrough. You can also go for something a little more still life, if that’s what you need.
If I want a cool static photo of a car that I made a nice livery for, I'll go to Scapes. I think Scapes is a more fun experience because you have so many more options. You fire up the mode and it dumps you into this menu with hundreds of locations you can select.
Step 2 - Choose the right location for your image
Location. Location. Location. The part of the image which ties your subject (the car) to reality. Where the image takes place can’t be overlooked in favour of just making sure the vehicle is in frame.
Cool warehouse shot in GT7 from Drivethrough
© Sony Interactive Entertainment & Davin Cornelius
“If I want to take a photo of my car at night with lights flying by in the background or one on a mountain pass in nature, I can do that. One of my favorite things to do when I first got the game was just digging through all the Scapes locations and saying ‘Hey, where have I actually been?’” says DriveThrough.
“I can take cars to places I've visited. For example, they have a lot of Vancouver in the game. You know, Stanley Park up in the mountains, where I've been. They have Chateau Frontenac in Quebec and you can take your car there and take some photos of it. It’s got Daytona Beach, places in France… Selecting a location is huge.”
Along with the *where* the photo takes place, you need to think about the environmental conditions. Different times of day will give you access to different lighting which will totally change the feel of our shot. Maybe you want a little rain so you can play with reflections and how the light bounces.
Museum worthy shot by Drivethrough
© Sony Interactive Entertainment & Davin Cornelius
Once you have a location picked, there's usually a pretty big selection of shots available there, so I take time selecting a nice background that I want behind my car. There are some cool ones from a museum in Japan that I really like using a lot because it looks like a nice studio where I can slap my cars and take pictures of them.
You can put up to 3 cars in a Scape so, depending on what you’re going for, don’t just pick the first environment you see. You might miss out on the perfect staging area to show off the fleet.
Step 3 - Select the right settings for your capture
Here is where a lot of people might need some help. If you’re not familiar with IRL photography, the amount of options and sliders for those options can be daunting. However, you don’t need to be an expert to do something really cool. The fun is in expressing yourself, so just play around ‘til you have something you like.
“I want to sort of spin the car in a way that I have a nice shot because you can't really move the camera in Scapes, you can just sort of zoom and pan but it's fine as long as you rotate your car in a nice spot and line up the shot,” says DriveThrough.
Some great lighting in this GT7 screenshot
© Sony Interactive Entertainment & Davin Cornelius
“Then, sort of mess with the camera settings like the focus, the aperture, and the shutter speed (depending on whether I want my car to be moving or not)”
Shutter speed is important for those high speed shots where you want to capture the whole car nice and clear. If your shutter speed is too slow, your image will get a little blurry as the vehicle zooms by. Unless that’s what you want. Play with everything. How do you think those nice blurry streak effects come to be?
With focus and aperture, you’re basically playing with how the subject and background will show up in your photo. What’s blurry? What’s in focus? Much of the image do you want these changes to effect? You can really play with the information relayed to people’s eyes when you mess around with the image’s depth of field.
Step 4 - Determine which effects you want to use in your picture
Take a look at other photos people have taken. Seriously. Some of those images look ripped straight off the wall as if they’re a poster someone spent all night designing on their laptop. No need for graveyard shifts in GT7 photo mode though. Between the filters and light adjustments, you can do some truly mind blowing stuff.
“Once I have all my settings I take my picture and can choose whether to save or not. If I'm not too happy with it I can just back out, adjust those filters and settings again, take another picture and then just sort of keep dialing it in from there,” says Drivethrough about the importance of trial and error. With the wealth of options available, it’s easy to go overboard, but he says you shouldn’t be afraid to keep going back and trying again.
Drivethrough Photo Mode Traxion Car
© Sony Interactive Entertainment & Davin Cornelius
It's easy to go too deep into the effects and make a weird, colourful abomination. If anything doesn't look particularly good, usually it's [because of the] colour. If I take a photo and I mess with the colours, I can look back at it and say that it's a little bit too gray and dreary or dry. Or it’s too saturated and popping too much. That's usually the stuff that I see first and want to go back and change.
Once you’ve got it looking just right, it’s time to share!
Who is Drivethrough?
Davin ‘Drivethrough’ Cornelius designs race car liveries across a few different titles and spends a lot of time streaming games for his personal channel as well his org Traxion’s channels.
“I've been playing racing games since before I knew what was going on. I think I was four years old. My dad bought me a PlayStation 2 and it came with the ATV: Offroad Fury 2. So my first game ever, I guess, was a racing game,” says Drivethrough.
Drivethrough showing off some aesthetics
© Sony Interactive Entertainment & Davin Cornelius
“I dabbled liveries as a kid on, like, Need for Speed and stuff, but I wasn't all that good at it. It only became a serious hobby in around 2016-2017. I started getting into racing sims where I could lay out a whole sheet of graphics and slap it on my car. Over the years it very slowly progressed from a hobby, and something I did for fun, to something I could actually get paid for and do as a job.”
The best part of making an incredible looking car is getting to show it off. So, as part of his craft, Davin ended up spending a lot of time in various photo modes, figuring out how best to show off his designs. Photo mode suites come in all shapes and sizes, with different games offering a different range of settings you can tweak to really flex your creativity.
Why should you care about photo mode?
One of the best parts of putting together a sick car design is getting to show people. Sony showed an incredible amount of forethought when they added a share button directly onto their PS4 controller, allowing people to share in-game content directly to social media. It wasn’t always that easy though.
“I remember back in Gran Turismo 5 and 6, the first ones that had really accessible online play, people would start race lobbies just to show off their cars. They’d have car meets where they go to the one little airport track inside Silverstone to look at each others’ cars and hangout. Back then you’d save the replay and take pictures after,” says Drivethrough.
While Gran Turismo 7 carries forward some of that spirit, allowing players to create hangout lobbies that aren’t about getting competitive, it’s no longer the only way to show off your imagination. But why should anyone care about taking in-game photos?
Drivethrough giving us some time to ponder with this shot
© Sony Interactive Entertainment & Davin Cornelius
Emergent gameplay is one of the most unique things which sets video games apart from other forms of media. With many forms of media we consume, you’re interacting passively. You’re accepting the creator’s vision as is, and drawing your conclusions from there. But with video games, the developers can’t control how every player is going to interact with their game. They can’t account for the complex layers of systems becoming even more complicated when the human element is added in.
Things like photo modes are almost like the developers challenging us, as players, to flex our creative muscles within a creative sandbox. The experience is leveled up even further when the toy chest you’re given for that sandbox is as high quality as the one provided by Gran Turismo 7.
“I honestly, wholeheartedly, believe this is the best game for livery editing and photography. The tools that they've developed are really incredible and I'm just excited to see what people make with them,” says Drivethrough.
