Quote Originally Posted by Ra-Tiel View Post
Good morning (or afternoon, or evening ) fellow cartographers.

I've started remapping a world from a heavily customized d20 game from long ago for an upcomming 4E Points of Light campaign. I'm primarily using Paint.NET - mostly because I just can't wrap my head around the GIMP interface. To create the basic shape and layout of maps I found a very nice tool: TerraJ.

I'm looking for suggestions and comments, because I'm sure there's quite some room for improvement. Just as a warning: I'm colorblind regard most green and brown tones and some red and green tones. Especially the light versions of these colors are a complete mystery to me, so if you have color suggestions please use the HEX or RGB formatting so that I can get it right.

So far I'm undecided what version I should use, the basic (colored) one or the aged version.

Also, putting in location names and other writings seems a tad more complicated than I thought. I tried putting in fonts directly, or on some sort of "background" (like a scroll image or shield image). When I wrote directly (without background) on the map the font was sometimes hard to read, no matter what font I used, while when I used a small scroll background it seemed to clutter up the map and distract from the important things.

Anyway, enough of my ramblings. Let the pictures talk. The first picture is the final, aged, map. The second shows the original from which I started my work. The third map is the colored version before aging.

Regards, Ra-Tiel.

PS: Regarding the scale... my maps are always measured in "scale of plot". I like to be able to resize the map on the fly if need be, without being tied down by some "1mile 10miles 100miles" scale bar.
First off, I rather like the shape of the world, it's very interesting.

Unfortunately, I don't know much about Paint.Net and most of the regulars here either use Photoshop or GIMP. I know we do have at least a lurker or two who use Paint.Net as I remember seeing some maps, so perhaps they can pipe up with suggestions.

My first thought is that your color and B/W versions have heavily pixelated lines, especially around land/water transitions, while the original done in TerraJ does not. Not sure if this is something in Paint.Net or perhaps the method it was saved to an output format for posting here. Or perhaps you increased the size from the original image?

Next on your main continent, at the NW corner of the "cracked" earth part(desert?) and at the very Southern tip of the same, there is a really hard line, so you may want to look at blurring this transition to the grasslands a bit more. This is not horribly bad on the B/W version, but on the color version, it is really jarring.

Finally, you should look to see if any other techniques would produce more distinctive mountains. If Paint.Net has forums, you might also want to check over there to see if anyone has done some top down mountains and could give you some pointers. Also, check some of the tutorials here to see if any of the techniques used to make mountains might have a close analog in Paint.Net that you can emulate.

As for the text and labeling and stuff, you really do need some kind of scale to be able to determine what is too much if you get my drift. Also, you could always keep your main map without labels and drill down to create regional maps with more detail such as names for town, mountain range, , desert, forest,etc.

Good luck with the rest of the map.

Joe