Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 4 Just Landed on Paramount+. Here's How to Screenshot It Properly

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds returned for its fourth season on Paramount+ this month, giving fans a new batch of the show's signature visuals — glowing bridge consoles, deep-space nebulas, richly lit alien environments. It's also a new batch of footage that's genuinely difficult to screenshot well. Dark scenes with saturated colored lighting are one of the hardest visual styles to compress cleanly, and a careless screenshot workflow turns a beautifully shot frame into a blocky, banded mess the moment it's shared.

Why This Particular Show Is Hard to Screenshot

Strange New Worlds' cinematography leans on deep blues and blacks punctuated by warm, saturated console and alert lighting — exactly the color range where compression artifacts show up first and most visibly. Dark backgrounds compress efficiently in theory, but the moment there's fine detail sitting on top of that darkness (starfield texture, subtle lighting gradients across a character's face), aggressive compression tends to flatten it into visible blocks or banding. A screenshot that looks fine at thumbnail size can look noticeably rough the moment someone views it at full size.

PNG vs. WebP for This Kind of Footage

Console readouts, LCARS interface text, and subtitles need sharp, artifact-free edges — that's PNG's strength, since it's lossless and won't blur fine text the way JPEG compression can. Wide nebula and star-field shots benefit more from WebP, which handles smooth photographic gradients at a meaningfully smaller file size than PNG without introducing the blocky artifacts JPEG produces in dark, detailed scenes. Picking one format for every screenshot regardless of content is the single most common mistake in a fan screenshot workflow.

The Screenshot Workflow That Actually Preserves Quality

1. Capture at the highest resolution your device and streaming app allow. A screenshot can never exceed the resolution it was captured at, and most phone screenshots are already lower-resolution than the source stream.
2. Avoid re-screenshotting a screenshot that's already been shared once — each pass compounds compression loss, especially visible in dark scenes.
3. Pick format by content, not habit — PNG for text and interface elements, WebP for photographic space and lighting scenes.
4. Compress after capturing, not by relying on whatever your phone or messaging app does automatically on send — manual, deliberate compression beats a platform's default every time for scenes this detail-dense.

Why This Matters Beyond One Show

Any dark, richly-lit, high-detail show — prestige sci-fi, moody prestige drama, anything shot with saturated practical lighting against dark backgrounds — hits this same compression problem. Strange New Worlds is simply one of the more visually demanding examples currently airing, which makes it a good test case for a screenshot workflow that'll hold up for the next difficult-to-shoot show too.

Optimage's format converter and compressor let you convert between PNG and WebP and dial in compression by hand, rather than accepting whatever a messaging app decides is good enough for a dark, detail-heavy frame.

What to Take From This

A new season of a visually ambitious show is exactly when screenshot quality matters most — these are the frames people actually want to share and revisit. Match the format to the scene, capture at full resolution, and compress deliberately once, and Strange New Worlds' bridge lighting and star fields will actually look the way the show's cinematographers intended.

Related reading:

• House of the Dragon Season 3: Screenshots & Share — the same dark-scene screenshot problem applied to another prestige show
• Silo Season 3: Dark Screenshots Compression — a deep dive specifically on compressing dark, low-light footage
• PNG vs. WebP for UI Design Assets — background on when each format actually wins