Learn Two New Techniques of How to Extract Still Frames From Any Video

If you ever tried to extract a good still frame from a video, you probably know there are few different methods of doing this, but none of them are really great. The most popular way of getting a still frame is playing the video on full screen, pausing on the right frame, and using Print Screen to capture that frame - it's a very limited method and the results are average at best. In this video, Photoshop product manager Bryan O'Neil Hughes shows two new methods available on Photoshop CC in which you can extract specific frames from any video file and save them in hi-res.

Of course, there are many other methods for exracting still frames from a video file. If you have an insteresting technique that might give better results we would love to hear about it in the comments below.

Noam Galai's picture

Noam Galai is a Senior Fstoppers Staff Writer and NYC Celebrity / Entertainment photographer. Noam's work appears on publications such as Time Magazine, New York Times, People Magazine, Vogue and Us Weekly on a daily basis.

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8 Comments

I pull stills from video all the time, I don't know how it slipped past me that you can do it in Photoshop! Ha ha. Thanks for the tip.

Maybe we are all taking Photoshop just as photo editing software, but it's actually a multi-purpose tool for all sorts of artists.

I was at Panasonic HQ in UK last week and was shown how you can pull stills from the recently released GH4 when shooting video, now i'm not a techy person at all but i was blown away by it, with my almost non existent knowledge of video i feel this could be a game changer, btw i have nothing to do with Panasonic and if i want one i gotta buy it.....full price, but i was impressed.

I have the GH4, pulling 4K stills from the video is really quite impressive. I've always used Premiere to export stills form video, seems the most logical way to get the best quality to me. The smart object conversion of multiple frames in PS is an interesting feature though.

In Final Cut Pro X 10.1.2, go to File/Share/Save Current Frame. If "Save Current Frame" is not there, you need to add it to the menu by going to, File/Share/Add Destination. Voila : )

Thats pretty awesome. I used to use After Effects and just render out frames, but this seems much easier and I like the stacking method.

Way to long, way to much complicated...
Use VLC and make a screengrab from there. And yes, if your footage is 4K, it will render a 4K jpg/png/whatever file

There's a tool called Anyframe that lets you capture still frames from videos. Looks like Vimeo support is coming, too. http://www.anyframe.net