Nvidia Ansel is an innovative in-game “photo” capture application, introduced to add more flexibility and variety of taking in-game screenshots. This ground-breaking technology by Nvidia, not only allows you to take 360° panoramic snaps but also offers the privilege to capture high-dynamic range (HDR) as well as Super-Resolution images. It has also been engineered to make various adjustments and use various filters for your snaps to further enrich your experience. Here’s how to use it:
What Are The Requirements Of Using Nvidia Ansel?
Most importantly your graphics card should at least belong to the Geforce GTX 600 series or higher. For laptop users, the lowest supported graphics processing unit (GPU), is the GTX 680M. You may refer the official link to know about the list of GPUs supporting Ansel. Most importantly, you have to make sure that your GeForce Experience application is updated.
List Of Games That Support Ansel
There are a very limited number of games supporting this technology at present. Nvidia is soon planning to extend its Ansel library to support more games. There is a small amount of work that needs to be done by the game developers to add support for Ansel.
To take the advantage of your GPU to its fullest we recommend you to use Ansel on games like The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Ghost Recon Wildlands and Watch Dogs 2. To know about the list of games that support Ansel, you may refer the official link.
How To Use Nvidia Ansel?
Accessing The Overlay
First and foremost, launch the game for which you want to use Ansel. When in-game, press Alt+F2, to launch the Ansel overlay. The game shall automatically pause, with a sidebar appearing on the left. This is the Ansel overlay which can be used to take your desired snaps. You can hold the left-mouse button to freely revolve an image across any direction. But before taking a snap, one should know about the various settings and features of Ansel.
Using Filters
You can add some amazing filters to beautify your desired snap. Ansel offers you to implement filters like Black & White, Retro, Sepia and Half-Tone. You may further calibrate the intensity meter to set the respective magnitude of a filter you are going to use.
Using Adjustments
You can set the brightness and contrast of your required snap by adjusting their respective meters. There’s a vibrance (saturation) meter as well that can be used to change the intensity of unsaturated colors.
Using FX
To add some special effects to your snaps, you can use various tools available in the FX menu. To implement an artistic feel, you can use the sketch meter. If you are not satisfied with the color intensity, you can use the enhancer to amplify it. The vignette meter can be used to implement dark portrait colors in the edges to add special focus to a particular scene. If you want perfect alignment for a specific shot, you can opt to use ‘Grid of thirds’, which breaks the screen into nine frames.
Using Camera & Capture
Before taking a picture, you should set the camera in accordance to get the best shot. This can be done with the help of the ‘Field-of-view (FOV)’ and ‘Roll’ bars. To zoom-in for a particular snap, you can use the FOV meter. In addition to that, you may also rotate the image freely with the help of ‘roll’.
Now that you are done with setting up the camera, you must specify the mode of capture for your snap to be taken. To take a normal shot, select ‘Screenshot’.
To take high-dynamic-range (HDR) images choose EXR. This mode allows you to store your images in a high-quality and lossless format that can be further edited in apps like Photoshop for extended purposes like advanced lighting effects and coloring schemes.
Most noteworthy, the Super Resolution tool enables you to capture images at a magnitude of 16 times more than that of 4K resolution. That would be around 63,920 x 36,096 pixels to be exact, thus equating to a file size of 47 GB. This can prove to be beneficial to obtain very high quality prints. You may also scale up or down the resolution using the meter in the overlay.
If interested to take 360 panoramic screenshots, you can opt for the 360 mode. On the other hand, the Stereo mode enables you to view static 3D screenshots from a 3D viewer. To leverage the advantage of both, you can choose 360 stereo to take snaps that can be viewed with the help of VR headsets.
How To Access The Snaps Taken Using Ansel?
The default location where your snaps get stored is – C:\Users\’Username’\Videos\’Game name’. It can also be changed using NvCameraConfiguration.exe located in ‘Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Ansel\Tools’.
How To View 360 Stereo Images?
There are numerous ways that can be implemented to view the 360° shots taken using Ansel. You can use a mobile/PC VR headset or platforms like Facebook/Google photos. There also exists a dedicated app known as Nvidia VR Viewer available on PlayStore. You can download and use it on your Android device to view 360° Stereo Ansel images. You may refer this tutorial on how to view the 360° Stereo images using VR.
You may also upload your 360° Ansel snaps to Facebook or Google Photos, to view them. To embrace the beauty of some 360° and super-resolution Ansel images, you may visit this link.
How To Further Modify The Settings Of Ansel?
Although the settings can be configured using the overlay itself, you can’t custom modify them. To rather configure Ansel more dynamically, you can open NvCameraConfiguration.exe located in ‘C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\Ansel\Tools’. You can cap up the super-resolution to more than 63k pixels wide, as per your requirement. Especially relevant, you can modify the camera movement speed as well. To remove black-tint during snaps, and to keep intermediate shots, you may check the respective boxes.
Also, you may refer this video below which explains how to use Nvidia Ansel.
You may also refer our tutorial on how to use Nvidia Share aka Shadow Play. If you have further queries on how to use Ansel then let us know in the comments section below.