[Award Winner] A medieval town map tutorial in Photoshop

[pyrandon]

While the Generator is a really neat program I highly recommend, remember that it is a "dumb machine"--meaning it produces roads that lead nowhere, houses in the middle of streets, odd shapes here and there, etc. So the first true step is to examine the map and "correct" any anomalies by erasing &/or adding elements--each in their respective layers, of course.

In the image below you can see that I added some buildings, roads, and water features, plus erased a few of the same. As the wonderful Guild members here pointed out in a works in progress (WIP) posting I used to quality check the finished map, I could have done much more to this--especially if Koppollex is intended to be a newer, more purposefully designed city--such as either eliminating meandering roads or adding more buildings to give them a purpose, but for my purposes I worked quickly and basically. (By the way, make sure to post your maps in the Guild's WIP forums; you'll get very useful advice!)

The rivers and roads were added with a hard-edged brush of the required size, using the color picker ("eye-dropper") to find the right color. The buildings were added freehand and by dabbing with a square edged brush (see image, below, for how to get to those brushes--and don't worry when it asks you to replace brush sets, you can always get back to the default brushes in the same way).

And by the way, if you want to get really technical &/or plan to do a lot of this sort of thing, I suggest creating a set of custom "building shape" brushes that are rotated, multi-shaped, etc. Creating custom brushes is amazingly quick & easy in Photoshop (do an Internet search & you'll learn how in about 2 minutes.)