trying to save the frame I'm looking at in video

[Confusal]

I'm sure I'll feel dumb when I find out, but Google isn't helping me. I want to take a single frame from a video and make it a regular photo. I play the video in Photoshop, get to the frame I want, then I can't come up with anything smarter than taking a system screenshot and cropping it back down to the frame, but that's crazy. 

I found the render option, so if I can guess the right range, I can make a bunch of frames, then browse through those, but I'm bad at guessing, and I'm staring at the frame I want. I must be able to tell photoshop to make what I'm looking at into it's own layer or png. 

Can anybody help? Again, I don't want to render hundreds or thousands of frames then search those, I want to watch my video and save the screen I'm looking at whenever I want. 

Thanks!

[Barbara Ash]

Would File  > Import > Video Frames to Layers work for you?

[Confusal]

Thank you for the reply! I looked at that, and it seems to be what I've done before, which results in thousands of frames from the video and hogs up my hard drive until I delete them.

It wants to select a whole video, but I'm watching the video and I see just a frame I want to keep. I usually take a dozen or so screen shots during a video, then look at them and pick a few I want to use for something or manipulate. 

Am I misunderstanding how to use it?

[Conrad C · Accepted solution]

The way I do it is:

1. Find the frame you want, like you already do
2. Duplicate that Video Group (not just the video layer), so that there’s now a duplicate video group that still shows the same frame in time
3. Select the duplicate video layer inside the duplicate video group, and choose Layer > Rasterize > Layer.

Rasterizing a video layer converts it into a normal still-image pixel layer, using the frame you were looking at.

Duplicating the original video group means you still have the video if you want to rasterize more stills out of it. If you only need one frame, you don’t need to duplicate the original, just convert the original.

[Confusal]

Thank you! I just tried it, and it did what I was after. Now I suppose the trick for me would be to create a quick key somehow that does exactly that. I do usually save a dozen or more stills from a video, and would like to save it and keep watching. 

I found an instruction page from Adobe claiming to do exactly the same thing, but step one is "choose composition, then select..." but I don't see a composition tab or menu so I think it's been gotten rid of. 

[Conrad C]

If you want make a quick pass through a video to snap frames out of it, and you don’t need to do any Photoshop editing at the moment, it might be worth it to do that frame grab pass in another application such as VLC (free) or Adobe Premiere Pro. Both applications provide a specific command, with keyboard shortcut, for saving the current frame as a still image. Then later you can open all those images in Photoshop.

[Confusal]

Thank you. Photoshop is the only program I've found that will go frame by frame forward and back. VLC will go one frame forward for a while before it crashes, but if you want to see the frame you just left, you have to go back a bunch and try to pause there again. Photoshop will step forward or backward one frame at a time. I don't know why nobody else does this, but I do it all the time. Photoshop also lets me slide quickly through the video with a preview so I can find a scene. That's rare-most video players assume you never look for a scene, or you know what the time mark is before you find it. 

I'll check out Adobe Premiere Pro. Most players are nearly useless for examining frame by frame. I don't know why I like to pause, move forward, then move back, over videos to see exactly what happened. I guess the people that make video players never back up a frame.