thankfully now that i know this i can get a really good shot for the Lake House DLC thumbnail
This is the thumbnail for my NieR Gestalt playthrough. Emil's mansion is a visually striking location in this game so it was on my shortlist for thumbnail ideas. Here's the problem though:
Unlike Replicant's remaster which allows you to turn off any and all HUD elements, Gestalt's Health and Magic meters are always present. So, okay, how do we fix this?
Okay, opening the map makes the health and magic bars go away, and then they fade back in once the map is closed. Conceivably, there should be at least a couple frames where both the map and HUD aren't onscreen, right? I'm disinclined to just frame-by-frame a video file and take a shot from that because I'm suspicious of the quality of raw screenshots vs screenshots from a video file, so I hope I can just time it right.
Most of these screenshots end up looking like this, with the bars at like 20% opacity or something. My timing is off pretty much every time, until...!
Aha!! Surely this time I've done it! I've managed to capture the EXACT frame I need to use for a clean thumbnail screenshot! My long quest is finally at an end.
...until, of course, I notice the faded red X above the mansion and the vision cone in front of Emil's front door. Yeah, turns out my timing was still off but rather than catching the health and magic bars as they faded in, i caught the tail end of the map fading out.
Eventually I resolved to just take another screenshot where the top right corner of the house is unobstructed and edit that into one of the screenshots where the HUD is present to give the illusion that all the HUD elements were removed. I'm pretty content with the admitted hackjob nature of it; you can only really tell if you know that you're looking for an edit.