Free-Floating Elements in PS

[ravells]

The other option is to use something like Inkscape (free vector) in conjunction with photoshop. Make a document in inkscape of exactly the same pixel dimensions as your photoshop document. Use inkscape to place your tree image (saved individually from PS and imported into inkscape) one at a time (much easier - it's like Campaign Cartographer) and save the result as a .png so the background is transparent. Use the 'place' command in photoshop to open the inskscape layer into your new layer in photoshop. If you have Adobe Illustrator it's even easier as you can freely move between the two and each program recognises the layers in the other.

[Dean]

Hmm, maybe Photofonts would work. It's a new font technology that allows for full-colored bitmap fonts. The Photoshop plugin is free. Creation of Photofonts is free and simple, if you know how to program an XML file. If not, there's a program you could buy to help compile your images into fonts.

The reason I think Photofonts would work well is because inserting your images as fonts would allow for fast and easy rescaling. Also, you could easily save many tree images as one "forest font", for example, and then you could have lots of variance in the forests in your map, WITHOUT the tedious copying of zillions of layers. Might be worth checking out at least. Do a google search.*