FTPro - Random World Mapping for Fun and (no) Profit

[ravells]

Making dotted or dashed borderlines in Photoshop is pretty easy.
For dotted lines, just use a hard round brush and adjust the spacing to suit. To make dashed lines, use a hard square brush and pull out the spacing past 100%, squash the brush tip shape so the square becomes a rectangle and set the Angle Jitter to 'Direction' under the Shape Dynamics Menu. Alternative dots and dashes together are slightly more involved, but I can take you through how to make those if you need them.

If what you're after is a more 'glowing border' effect, then use a soft brush on its own layer. Again a bit more fiddling required, but I can do a quick tut for you if you want.

For cities you need to first decide how you want to depict them, whether as abstract symbols like squares or circles or something more hand drawn like little pictures of buildings and the like.

[Master TMO]

I have experience manipulating photos and doing some sorta-photorealistic art attempts in PS, but I've never tried atlas-style mapping before. A little bit of experimentation brought me one way to do borders: Create a new layer, fill it with white, set the blending mode to 'Darken'. Add a Layer Mask that hides everything. Set the Layer Effects to Stroke a solid 1px line in the color you want. Then use a hard-edged eraser in the Layer Mask to lay out your area. It should create a visible border around the area you are erasing. You can also add an Inner or Outer Glow to it if you want. This is probably Photoshop Mapping 101 level stuff though, especially since I'm using an older version of PS.

[ravells]

There's lots of ways, and that sounds like a good one for solid and inner glow borders! Sounds like you have it all under control!

[Master TMO]

What is the best way to add points in Photoshop? I played around a bit with the Polygon tool yesterday, but they are hard to reliably see at different zooms. Which may be something I just have to deal with in PS. At the moment I'm just plotting generalities, like historic regions and prime city locations. Ideally I'd like a vector layer of points I can just turn on and off that are visible at any zoom level. But, again, PS may not do that.

[ravells]

To be honest, I tend to do all my borders, city dots and labelling in vector. It's much faster, easier and editable.

If you want to add a point, zoom in, use the ellipse selection tool (hold down the shift key to constrain it to a circle) and then fill and stroke it with the colour(s) of your choice.

[Master TMO]

Any good free vector tools out there? I have an older vintage copy of Illustrator also, but it is not compatible with 64-bit Win7 (to be honest, I'm kinda surprised Photoshop is compatible. Happy, but surprised). And I don't feel like going back to my old Win95 system just to do some vector points.

[ravells]

Inkscape is free! It's probably the best of the free ones out there.

[Master TMO]

No idea if I'm going to keep the boundaries, but here's what the test looks like. Not really usable for a final version, but nice for plotting and planning.

[ravells]

The problem with the 'glowing edges' border is that it's not really designed to work with satellite style maps, it's more for hand drawn styles (or that's how it's been traditionally used). You might be better off using a more 'atlas' style where the boundaries are usually dashed lines?

One of the challenges you may have to work around is the the shaded relief detail...might be worth pulling that back a tad by using a more muted colour ramp so the borders show up better.

[Master TMO]

True on the borders. I imagine, however, that a usable regional map might very well not use any of the FT original data. While it's great at building an entire world, even at high resolution it just isn't quite detailed enough to zoom in without seeing obvious artifacts. I used a resolution of 4096 to build the world map, which gives a scale of 1 pixel = 9.8 miles. The purple country up there is about 600 mi x 330 mi. So that's a detail of approximately 60 pixels by 33 pixels in size. If I take the resolution up to the apparent max of 8000, that's 5 miles per pixel, which would double the image size to 120 x 66 pixels. You can't zoom in to that very far without the pixellation being obvious. So the FT maps will need to be used for the larger satellite views, either world or regional, while closeups will need hand-painting.

Which is a totally new skillset for me. Never even attempted it before, although I've looked at maps other folks have produced. Wheee fun! To the Tutorial section!!! Now if only there were more hours in the day.....