Any tips for turning screengrabs into fanart?

Quite a lot of my movies I'm pretty sure won't have fanart anytime soon, for example some 60s french movies. However I'd still like to use a skin with fanart.

Does anyone have any tips for cleaning up a VLC 'snapshot' in photoshop? That way I could just use movie screengrabs to plug the gaps.

I tried using a surface blur filter, which looks ok but compared to hi-res fanart seems to jar a bit.

I'm not real familiar with photoshop anymore but with GIMP i often use the newsprint distortion.
I dupe the image then use newsprint (smallest dpi /w highest antialiasing), then test out various opacities for this new layer.
You may also want to consider scanlines or an erase every other row method.
A few simple tricks like this can easily turn a so/so screencap into something half decent for fantart.

Ringoko, it's really not that hard to make a decent fanart image from the video file. You'll want to play your video in Media Player Classic and look for a scene that you think summarizes the movie well enough.


Here is one I did for A Fistful of Dollars.

Once you've got the image you want go to File - Save Image. Then open that image in your image editor and change the size to 1280x720

You can also apply some filters to make it look better if it's a lower quality video file. I hope this helps you out.

Ember Media Manager does this quite well

Great.