Use a "magic wand" tool to select the coast line. Expand the selection 1 pixel, expand it using feather by about 3 more pixels and then use a heavy blur like gaussian 2 or 3 or so. Worked pretty good for me on a test swatch of your map.
Hi guys! I've been lurking for quite a long time while I make a map for my headworld. I'm trying to figure out how to get less pixelated coastlines since I used the cloudfilter/threshold layer to generate my landmasses, but now my coastlines are pretty jagged and weird looking when you look at it in full res. Which kind of goes against how I wanted it to look in the first place. Basically, I'm looking to see if I can fix them without needing to pen in the coasts myself. If not, then I guess that's okay, probably would go better with the style that I'm working with anyway.
Here's my map so you can look at it.
regional2-2.png
Thanks in advance!
Use a "magic wand" tool to select the coast line. Expand the selection 1 pixel, expand it using feather by about 3 more pixels and then use a heavy blur like gaussian 2 or 3 or so. Worked pretty good for me on a test swatch of your map.
What software are you using ? If your coasts are on a separate layer you could apply some blur effect and lower the opacity.
Great map by the way !
Awesome! That helped a bunch! Thanks guys. c: And I'm using photoshop. I guess I should have mentioned that huh.
THe artwork is very nice. Your rivers are running backwards from gravity-based expectations though (water starts as small streams and flows downhill, gathering together in rivers before getting to the oceans).
Thank you! Darn, didn't think about that. Thanks though, I'll definitely fix it. Now I need to figure out how to not get nit-picky with projections.
You can also do the initial coastline map in a higher resolution than the final desired one and then downsize the image when you're done the coasts, leading to a smooth appearance, although this does make adjusting the coast later a bit tricky.
Also, using a thinner stroke for coastlines would help in lessening the pixellated appearance.
I wonder if you might get a prettier result if you dropped the stroke and replaced it with an inner glow edge instead. Make it a really thin dark colored multiply that fades off as it gets more inland. It might match your coloring a bit better.