How to create Panorama screenshots

Overview

Hi guys! As many people liked my recently uploaded panorama I decided to share my knowledge of how to make high resolution screenshots and how to create a panorama out of them.

1.Graphic settings

Before we are going to make screenshots, we want to select the best graphic settings. We click on “Options” in the main menue and see the overview of the graphic settings available. I recommend at first to select “Very High” Graphic options on the left side:
Actually that are still not the best possible settings in my experience, so it is better to do the changes marked red on the 2nd picture. If you have chosen the settings like in picture 2 you can click on “Accept changes” and going to open a battle replay of your choice. Of course if you want feel free to use any graphic mod (I didn’t used one, but for sure there are some that make it look even better).
Don’t use this settings for battles you gonna play, but only for replays (except you have a super powerful PC). Even in replays the game can become really laggy with those settings for me. Additionally I find it way easier to remember after a battle where and when on the battlefield has been an epic scene.

2.Taking screenshots

When you have decided for an epic replay and loaded in you try to find a scene that looks really awesome in your opinion (remember we gonna create a panorama, theoretically you can create a 360° picture of the scene so being right in the middle of the action can be a good way too!). Press “k” to remove the HUD. You need to press pause then, so nothing is going to move(Pause need to be active the entire time you are taking screenshots or it won’t work). As important as having pause active is not to lose your point of turning! This means you are under no circumstances allowed to move the cursor to the sides of the display and also never press WASD during your progress. If you lose your point of turning you most likely never get it back and you can start making screen again as you won’t be able to create a panorama from screenshots of different point of turning!

Warning: Don’t select a scene with long straight lines in the turning point of your panorama or it can look absoluty terrible as shown in the 2 examples below.

This is a picture of a custom map I am working on. Usually the wall is straight and so is the line of the attackers, but as it is a panorama it can look like this (btw. I worked over 300 hours on this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ map and its now officially over 1 year work in progress: shame on me! )
Even more terrible looks this Yari Ashigaru! If you want a Panorama called banana war, go for it! But for me its not looking really epic (or maybe on another level of it).

I have now decided to take a screenshot of this scene.
Our next step is pressing “n” to zoom in. I recommend to zoom in one of the corners of your Panorama as this makes the work way more easy. If you want to fine tune the picture you can zoom even more in(for even better quality overall) or out by scrolling with the mousewheel and when you press and hold the mousewheel and then move the mouse left, right, up or down you can change the angle. I choosed the lower left corner.
Take a screenshot with f12 and move on to the next picture. You do that by press and hold the mousewheel again and in this case I only move it right side (as we started left side).
It is really important that you can always see a part from the 1st screenshot on the 2nd one aswell, or you will receive gaps in the picture. Take another screen and move on with that method to take some more screens.
You continue with that method until you reach your chosen right side of the panorama.
Your step now is not moving the mouse left or right, but upwards (we started in the lower corner).
Now you move your mouse only left again until you reach your chosen left side again. Then you move your mouse up again and take screenshots of the next layer in the right direction. I think you see now where this is going.

Overall you slowly build up a huge picture line after line with that method.

Warning: Don’t close your game now or lose your point of turning! This is really important if your panorama will have gaps and this most likely gonna be the case!

3.Creating the panorama

After taking many screens we want to create a panorama out of them now.

For that we need a special software that can create panoramas. Photoshop most likely is able to do it aswell, but either it cost you money or you need to get a cracked version. Since I am a loyal citizen of the law and I would under no circumstances ever commit a crime(*cough*), I decided to use a free and legally version of an old photoprogramme. You can download it for free from this website (the website is German as I am aswell, I don’t know if the programme after installation can also run in an English version):
[link]

As you will take many screenshots for a panorma and only want the right oney being merged into it, I recommend an extra folder called “Panorama screenshots” where you put in all of them. Really it helps alot to manage them all way better. You can find your Shogun 2 screenshots here:
C:Program Files (x86)Steamuserdata216084273760remote34330screenshots
(Depending on your Computer you maybe need to replace the C: with a D: )

Open now “Windows Fotogalerie 2012” and select “Panorama screenshots” on the left side.
You will see a list of all your Panorama screenshots. Select all of them and then click on “Erstellen” (engl. create) and then on Panorama (marked red).

Now it can take some time until the programme finished your panorama. And not seldom it can look like this:
You see it is full of gaps (black areas) that make the picture not looking good(you can ignore the black areas at the side, thats normal for a panorama, we will cutting out only the picture to remove them). That is the reason why you had to leave the game open. You can go back to your point of turning and make screens at the areas that were not covered in your first try. Go back to “Windows Fotogalerie 2012” and create a new panorama with the new screenshots. When the panorama is created you check again if still something is missing. If everything is looking good to you, then you going to cut out the picture. Here is the result of my Panorama:

Advise: Panoramas can take up a lot of storage space. If you want to upload them on Steam or Discord you are often limited to 8MB. Here is a link to a good picture compress page. When I used it I found my quality not getting worse while it more than halfed the storage space:
[link]