Half World WIP

I'm making a map for a fantasy book I'm writing. Currently unnamed, only half of the world. I'm following the Saderan tutorial so far, I've done a test run and have different colors in mind for the land and stuff. Armed with Photoshop CS5 trail I plan to do the best possible! And hopefully also buy photoshop fairly soon ;) Anyway, this is what I've got so far, any suggestions or advice is welcome :)

The original size was 12,500 x 6,000 pixels but wouldn't upload here so I made it smaller. Is there a file size limit for the attachment manager?

If anyone has trouble with the image loading let me know and I'll fix it.

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The size limit is 4.77MB for most types of files; you can see the limit for each filetype in the "Attachment Key" under the browse/upload section of the Attachment Manager. This is looking good so far, right on track :)

What map projection are you using? I would suggest reading up on cartographic projection at Wikipedia or here (equirectangular is the most practical because most projection-conversion programs use it as the basic input projection), but regardless of what projection you've used (except maybe Mercator, where you've left out the highest and lowest latitudes), your map is going to have severe polar distortion in the extreme north and south: when mapped on a globe, it will look like sharp points are pointing towards the poles.

Be aware that around the landmass there is a border (light blue I believe) running along the coast line (in the water). I just opened the image and zoomed in when I noticed it. I didnt check out the whole map but it seemed to be there at a quick glance. So mold the water layer a bit to avoid this "underwater" elevation !

Gidde- Ah, okay, thanks.

Naeddyr- Um, I suppose I'm not using one at all :? But I think I understand what your saying, I stuck it on the google earth globe and see it. I hadn't really thought about doing anything like that, I'll be reading the stuff in that link. Thanks for the info!

AMdickovd- Oh, thank you! I don't know how I didn't see that, I'll get to fixing it!

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Originally Posted by BookOwl

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Naeddyr- Um, I suppose I'm not using one at all :? But I think I understand what your saying, I stuck it on the google earth globe and see it. I hadn't really thought about doing anything like that, I'll be reading the stuff in that link. Thanks for the info!

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Well, you're still just working on your map, so all is not lost. Just scale it so that it's size is twice as wide as it is tall, then you can say it's in the equirectangular projection, and everything follows from that. Fix the poles using this tutorial: http://naeddyr.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d1yxg0i Use Hugin to shift the poles so that they lie on the equator (on the middle of the map), and then fix everything there so that that it looks good. Then change everything back, and Robert is your mother's brother, voila. After that, you have a map in equirectangular that can be inserted into any of G.projector, Flex-projector or Hugin to transform your map into a better-suited projection (or put on a globe).

Okay, I did my best to get rid of the light blue outline that was around all the land, you can still see it a little bit but it's hardly noticeable. I resized it so it's "equirectangula." It was already very close so it wasn't a problem. I've added some more underwater terrain and added a touch more color to the ocean. I'm thinking I might go darker with the water before it's all said and done but I'll decide on that later.

Naeddyr, should I fix the poles and stuff before or after I do anything else with this? Like will it royally distort the colors and stuff if I wait until it's totally finished?

And thanks for the advice evryone! :D

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Originally Posted by BookOwl

Okay, I did my best to get rid of the light blue outline that was around all the land, you can still see it a little bit but it's hardly noticeable.

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Think since I brought it up I better comment on it - yes looking closely at it you can still see it however with the new additional to the underwater terrain it simply just seem like the coast line are somewhat shallow then take a dip downward - you actually turned something wierd looking into a darn cool feature - which I will steal at some point in time :)

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Originally Posted by BookOwl

Naeddyr, should I fix the poles and stuff before or after I do anything else with this? Like will it royally distort the colors and stuff if I wait until it's totally finished?

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The thing I always do is, that I have a base map, a black-for-land-white-for-sea binary colour map. I then transform that based map (possibly also rough rivers and mountain layers) into whatever projection I'm going to work on, and *that* image is what I primarily work on. I redo the rivers and mountains and other features, etc. This is because any cartographic transformation will cause significant and obvious distortion; except maybe on a satellite-style map. But certainly don't put down things like text yet. So, yes, I would certainly fix the basix shapes of the continent the very first thing I do.

When I tried to save that last version of my map something went wrong and it didn't save so I had to redo the muting of the blue outline and redo the underwater terrain that I had done that day :| But I think it looks better this time, so all's good!

Also, this picture is a bit bigger than the last ones.

Naeddyr I think I'll finish it, without text and fancy stuff, and then try it. If the distortion is too much I 'll think about redoing it for a globe version, we'll see ;)

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