I agree about the frame. Not sure what I want to do there honestly and the frame is a place holder until I decide. I'm considering another bit of layer work and introducing a frayed cloth border around the whole thing. I don't want to start doing things like that until I get it broken down into work files for regions though. With my luck I'd do something dumb and edit the main layer into fraying, then save over it and lose the outer edge of the map itself.
Resolution and what's been done to it:
Software: Fractal Terrains, Photoshop CS4
First of all, that's a reduced size file. The mid-size I'm working on right now is about 15k px horizontal and is not the highest res version.
To get to where it is I built the world map in Fractal Terrains, edited the land and finally exported to multiple files and stitched these together in Photoshop. This document was running 30,000px by ~25,000px.
There's a bug with the export to multiple files in Fractal Terrains which results in part of the map (top and bottom) not getting exported. I used 'save as' to save out oversized screens of the land masses that were missing and manually stitched in the missing land masses and much of the missing ocean.
The rest of the missing ocean was filled in with a mix of the smudge tool, the clone stamp tool, and some scale transformations.
Next, I used color selection to select the water. I copied that into another layer, inverted it and grabbed the land to a separate layer as well. Those are my base working layers.
Still in the high resolution version, I ran a 'find edges' filter over a copy of the ocean. After a little clean up I adjusted the hue and saturation to get the faded blue you see in that image.
I saved, then re-saved a working copy at ~15,000 px wide.
Then I took the land, blurred it slightly (I don't think it's even noticeable after the resize) and adjusted the vibrance and saturation of that layer.
Next, the base color and texture. I dropped a layer of (not quite) sepia under my blue water.
I added another layer of similar sepia over the land layer. That layer was then run through a filter (if someone wants to know the exact filter I'll look it up. Not on my tower atm.)to produce the fiber effect. I then dropped the transparency level on the 'cloth' texture and adjusted hue and saturation on it to get the desired look.
Lastly I went through and tweaked the vibrance again on the land to get it where I wanted.
The compass symbol is a set of circle, triangle, and line shapes grouped, rasterized and distorted a bit.
The text is pretty straight forward Papyrus font arced and with a bit of vertical distortion... then rasterized and distorted the same way as the compass.
The border was just because I needed something around it. I'll try to come up with something better.
Then I resized it, saved for web, and shared a copy with you guys :p
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