How to Pull High-Resolution Stills from a Video Using Photoshop

Yes, Adobe Photoshop can handle videos! Sometimes the perfect image you want to use as a still photo for your website, marketing, or clients, is within a high-definition video frame. Photoshop is a great tool for pulling high-resolution photos from within your videos.

There are a couple of ways to pull pics from videos in Photoshop, and this tutorial will cover one of those methods.

In this tutorial, we used Photoshop CS5, but the steps are exactly the same for CS6.

Let’s begin.

1. Open Adobe Photoshop.

2. Import your video file by going to File > Import > Video Frames to Layers…

3. Select the range of the file you would like to import. It’s important to remember this method is limited to 500 frames, so you can also check mark the “Limit to Every” box, and choose your frame intervals, such as every 5 frames. Move the arrow to mark the beginning of your selection, and then hold down the shift key  and click and drag to the end of your selection. Select “OK.”

4. Now your selected video frames will import as layers, and you can see them on the bottom right hand corner.

The “eyeball” to the left of each layer thumbnail represents that you can see the image. To remove and add the “eyeball”, simply left click on it once.

5. Click on layer you want to use as your still shot, and click on the empty space to left of the thumbnail image for that layer to show the eyeball. Make sure the layer/image shows in the viewport. If you don’t see it, you may have a layer with an eyeball in the list of above it. Just check and remove any eyeballs above the layer you want to use.

6. For a high resolution image, Go to File > Save as…

7. Name your image, select “Jpg” from the dropdown, and then select “Save.”

8. Select the settings as shown below and select “OK.”

And that’s it! You now have a high-resolution photo pulled from your high-definition video! Keep moving that eyeball and saving jpg images for any of the frames you like.

Copyright © T&C Aerial Drone Imaging Services

A special thank you to T&C Aerial Drone Imaging Services for allowing us to use your wonderful aerial photography video of Silverwood Lake!