My partner and I sunk hundreds of hours into Zelda BotW, and enjoyed every minute. I wanted to immortalize our playthrough somehow, and the Hero's Path DLC feature gave me an idea for how to do it. I used the Switch's screenshot feature and Photoshop's photomerge tool to recreate the entire map with our entire playthrough trail overlayed on top of it. After painstakingly saving, cropping, merging, troubleshooting, and tweaking over 200 screenshots, I finally got a result I was proud of. The final map printed at 16x20 at 300 dpi with no problem, and it looks fantastic on my game room wall. Thank you Nintendo for an amazing adventure that I'll never forget!
Here's the original image. The end result of the merge was 5842x4868, just shy of the 6000x4800 I needed for a 16x20 print at 300 dpi. Adding the border allowed me to compensate for this without doing any additional scaling which may have lessened quality. Ironically, the framing process cut out the border completely, but oh well!
In case anyone wants to recreate this project for themselves, here are some tips:
I did my screenshots at the second highest zoom level. The highest zoom level would have been absurdly difficult and time consuming, and the next level out was too small to print nicely, so I settled here. The screenshots from the Switch are 720p, though if you have a dedicated capture device you may be able to get quality 1080p shots. Not sure how the quality of a native 720p screenshot compares to a 1080p captured still, but it's worth looking into.
Moving the map in regular intervals was especially difficult due to the analog stick, so I ended up taking more screenshots than I probably needed. Even then, I did need to go back once or twice and take screenshots of little gaps that I'd missed. This did come in handy for removing the green cursors in the center of every image though.
Cropping in allowed me to get the cleanest image I could. I erred on the side of caution, as while there was more map in each screenshot, it was distorted by vignette and other effects. Photoshop was already unhappy about all the merging, so I wanted to make it as easy as possible.
Pro Tip: Don't expect Photoshop to merge 200+ images. Trying to do this ended up crashing the program. I ended up breaking the screenshots into groups, merging the groups, and so on, as shown here. This ended up keeping my files more organized and manageable, as I could address any flaws and touch ups in each merge before moving it up the ladder.
