Ruedy! A pleasure to meet a colleague here! I've never seen the OIK before, but from the few things I can find there without knowing German, it looks beautiful.

Does OIK have an associated universe and astronomy society? MCS and another English cartography society are thinking of joining a common universe simulation, in which our planets are in the same galaxy (possibly even solar system, we're still debating that). Would the Germans be interested in working with us on that?

Doctor, my friend Hesam made this original in MSPaint (yes, MSPaint; he's that hard-core). I touched it up in Photoshop and a little PaintShop based mostly on Pyradon's city tutorials.

There is a larger version, but it looks awful. Because the Paint file doesn't have layers, I couldn't figure out how to get rid of the text, and I ended up just zooming out to a degree where no one could tell there were mangled, half-erased labels everywhere. Is there any way to remove the text in preparation for more complicated graphics work other than manually?

For example, is there anything similar to PaintShopPro's "select color range" in Photoshop? Photoshop has its own "select color range" command, but it seems very different (based on midtones and highlights and works off the flat image instead of just one layer). I'm looking for something where I could say "RGB 120-150-80: select every pixel with that color with a tolerance of 10 in Layer 2". Can Photoshop do that?

What about some sort of scratch remover where I could define everything of the text color as "scratches". I'm sort of new to Photoshop so I don't know these things.