There are lots and lots of different screenshots in our feeds and hubs and every day new ones are created and uploaded. The simplest way for making a shot is to press F12 and include an 'epic' HUD or some text on the shot as well.

For some people, this is enough. For others, it is not.

The advanced option in 'Dark Souls III' is to use the 'Binocular' item and to hide the HUD in the settings. That's a huge step forward, however, there's still potential for even better shots.
In this guide, I want to give some information on how to take some more beautiful (or terrifying) screenshots from Lothric and its inhabitants.

We need the following tools:

• Cheat Engine + CE Table for Dark Souls III
  
• Cinematic Tools for Dark Souls III
  
• Optional: ICE (Image Composite Editor)

I'm quite sure that some of you have not the slightest clue what I have mentioned here.
To give you some insight on this topic I decided to include a short 'Basics' section.
People who already know all these information can skip the next part entirely I guess.

Moreover, some advanced mechanics would be to use a combination of both a CE Table as well as Hattiwatti's amazing cinematic tools[cinetools.xyz] which include an easy-to-use free camera as well as options to adjust FOV (Field of View) and block some inputs.
The combination of both these tools gives you some useful options to create impressive screenshots.

There are a lot of ways and tools to make your game and the screenshots you take look more interesting without the use of additional post-processing tools like e.g. Photoshop or Gimp.
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On the one hand, there are effects like ReShade/MasterEffect/SweetFX or ENB that can change a games' atmosphere and appearance entirely by adding new shaders, filters or additional effects like e.g. a film grain to the image. They can have a huge impact on the visual quality and the created atmosphere and are one of the most basic, but also most important tools out there.

'Presets' for particular games can e.g. be found in the SweetFX Settings DB.[sfx.thelazy.net]

You can find a lot of different presets for Dark Souls III[sfx.thelazy.net] there as well and take one that suits your needs and ideas of a beautiful and atmospheric game the most.

Installing the ReShade is quite easy and there's always/most of the time a detailled description included by the author.
(The next step would be to create an own preset setting or tweak an existing one, but that's another story.)
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Microsoft's neat little tool allows the user to create panoramic screenshots by stitching several shots together.
Whenever you see some pretty amazing widescreen shots in a game hub or in the feed (most of the time they have a weird resolution as well) you can suppose that 'ICE' was used to create them.

It is used for landscape, architecture and character shots alike and can be downloaded from the official website.[research.microsoft.com]

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'Cheat Engine' is not only used by cheaters to hack their in-game wallets but often by screenshot enthusiasts as well to enable e.g. free camera modes in games that don't have the option included in the vanilla version.

You need the main tool that can be found here[www.cheatengine.org]) and the table for your particular game. In terms of Dark Souls III, you can use e.g. this one here.[forum.cheatengine.org]

Update January 2020: It seems this table is not available anymore. Now I use The Free Camera of the Cinematic Tools and combine it with the Challenge Mods CE table's Timestop feature. You can find this table >here<[www.nexusmods.com]

Important: Only use the Cheat Engine in Dark Souls III while playing offline (e.g. activate the option to start the game in offline mode in the settings), else you could risk a (soft) ban for this game.
In general: As long as the game is only a singleplayer game there's neither a risk nor a problem, but when you use Cheat Engine in Multiplayer Games it can get nasty. Aside from the fact that cheaters in MP are really terrible beings.
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Have you ever seen a screenshot and thought 'Damn, that is a high resolution! ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)'?

If you have a powerful rig you can enable 'DSR' (downsampling) to make some of your games look even more stunning. For Nvidia users, there's a quite easy way that is e.g. explained in detail here.[nvidia.custhelp.com]

More advanced options to achieve some higher resolutions and aspect ratios (without stitching multiple shots) would be Custom DSR[www.deadendthrills.com] or SWRE.[github.com]
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Yup, Cinematic Tools are amazing. Hattiwatti created some impressive little tools for various games to get access to a Free Camera, Timestop, FOV adjustments and various other things. It's pretty simple: download the Cinematic Tool for DS III, run the game and then inject the .dll with the Extreme Injector (Choose .exe and hit 'Inject'). It's running as a seperate program and shows all the options and hotkeys as well. Easy to use but super effective!

In terms of landscapes and architecture, Lothric has a lot of potential for some epic screenshots.
To capture them in the best possible way we want to use a free camera and e.g. stitch several shots together to create an epic panorama. This is surprisingly easy:

(Important: Only use the Cheat Engine in Dark Souls III while playing offline (e.g. activate the option to start the game in offline mode in the settings), else you could risk a (soft) ban for this game.
In general: As long as the game is only a singleplayer game there's neither a risk nor a problem, but when you use Cheat Engine in Multiplayer Games it can get nasty. Aside from the fact that cheaters in MP are really terrible beings.)

1. First, you start 'Cheat Engine' and afterward 'Dark Souls III'.
When the game has started successfully you can choose the process by clicking on the flashing computer icon in the top left of the Cheat Engine window:



Choose 'DarkSoulsIII.exe' and click on open:



2. Afterward, you have to click on the folder icon in the upper left and select the particular Cheat Engine Table for the game (e.g. June 26 here for Dark Souls III):





Confirm the appearing messages.



3. Now you can choose the options for the game by clicking here:



For Dark Souls III there are e.g. some neat little camera options that can be found in the 'Camera' section.
Simply click in the field with 'Free Camera' to activate it and click again to deactivate it.



This camera can be quite handy to take some epic captures of the beautiful architecture or the landscape. Being in offline mode due to Cheat Engine also has the advantage that there are no blood signs or ghosts in your world that can 'disturb' the shot.

4. Now you can take several connecting pictures of an area and insert them here in the Image Composite Editor:



Then follow the instructions to stitch and crop the shot and then... profit.

Here are some example shots:

Compared to panoramic landscape shots it's a bit more difficult to create impressive captures of bosses and enemies because you can't pause their movements and some of them tend to move very quick. Creating panoramic shots that way is... tricky and leads mostly to weird results full of stitching errors.

Solution:
Either you have to be very good with the timing or you need to be very lucky.
For both ways, you need a lot of patience and making single shots instead of a panorama is most of the time the better option.

Here we need Cheat Engine as well.
There are several possible ways to capture the bosses in some nice action shots.
Personally, I followed these steps:

• When you enter the boss fight you activate the 'Godmode' in Cheat Engine.
  (Scripts -> Unlimited iFrames (Godmode))
  
  
  
  
• Afterwards you can e.g. lay your character on the ground with the 'Stretch Out' gesture and disable the HUD in the settings.
  
• Now you activate the Free Camera in Cheat Engine and watch the fight while pressing the Print Screen key (default screenshot button in ReShade) every now and then to capture a cool move or a nice scene.

In the end, you'll have a lot of shots and then you can decide which one looks really cool and which one is just plain horrible (approximately 75% of the shots I take that way are garbage).
It sounds a bit random and yeah it is, that's mostly the whole trick here.

However it can turn out pretty cool, some examples can be found here: