Everything you need to know about Days Gone’s feature-heavy Photo Mode

Hello, PlayStation fans! Now that Days Gone has officially gone gold, I’m happy to finally share details about Bend Studio’s implementation of Photo Mode.

The world of Days Gone includes a regular day/night cycle, and multiple biomes weather types. And that’s why we’re giving players all the tools they need to share these breathtaking vistas and unique sandbox gameplay moments.

The vast Central Oregon wilderness is so beautifully crafted and rendered in Days Gone it’s easy to forget that you’re playing a game. The design aim for Photo Mode was to make players feel like they are using and manipulating a real camera in the real world.

This includes all the features that people expect to come standard these days.

From the Characters panel, users can toggle character and bike visibility as well as select from a library of facial expressions. The Frames & Presets panel hosts 9 custom frames, several black frame shapes and sizes, Days Gone logo options, and 18 filter presets.

The Lens panel lets players manipulate Field of View, Focal Distance, Aperture, and Film Grain. One of our first features we developed for Photo Mode was the inclusion of Focus Lock, which allows users to set a permanent focus point that stays sharp no matter where they move the camera.

But the piece de resistance is our Advanced Mode where users can fine-tune their final shots by manipulating by 55 different settings across Bloom, Color Grading, and Color Depth Grading panels.

We worked closely with members of the Art team, including some Hollywood veterans, to help define the essential properties to expose to capture all the power and flexibility that comes with professional photo editing software.

This is the very same interface our artists used to author the filter presets that ship with the game. Players can even take one of our presets as a starting point for learning how Advanced Mode works, and use it a baseline for creating their own filter that can be saved to one of five preset slots for easy re-use later.

And finally, all of this is available at launch. Everyone at Bend Studio can’t wait to see the all pictures the community creates starting 26th April!