Trainz/Taking Screenshots

Press F5 to remove Trainz's on-screen overlays. To restore the overlays, press F5 again.

Screenshots can be taken in Surveyor mode, Driver mode or while playing scenarios by pressing the PrintScreen key, Prt Sc. Trainz does not react to pressing Prt Sc in the same way as most Windows programs: instead of storing a single screen image in the clipboard (the cut and paste buffer), for every press of Prt Sc Trainz creates a TARGA image file (file extension .tga) and stores it in Trainz's 'Screenshots' folder (for example C:\Program Files\Auran\TRS2004\Screenshots\ for TRS2004). These files are numbered sequentially like Screen_001.tga.

Tips for creating screenshots

• Press Alt+U in Surveyor mode to switch to 'look around' mode. This can be useful to get exact positioning of screenshots. All menus and the compass point are removed. Press Esc to exit 'look around' mode.
• Press Alt+Y in Surveyor mode to switch to 'walk around' mode. A view from the ground from which the height is not adjustable.
• Experiment with increasing your screen resolution and then taking the shot. In an image editing program reduce to a suitable size.

Manipulating screenshot images

After closing Trainz, the TARGA files can be opened in an image processing program such as Irfanview where operations including the following can be performed:

• Cropping (removing unwanted parts of the image).
• Adjustment of the brightness/gamma, contrast, or RGB colour balance.
• Conversion to an image file format such as jpg which will greatly reduce the file size.

For advanced image processing a more sophisticated program such as GIMP or PhotoShop can be used.