Smooth coasts & Style?

[Alex]

Hello forum,

I have been trying to make my coasts smoother or at least a lot less pixelized. I have followed the tutorial, which is the "Saderan" tutorial, straight down to the last word, but I can't get my to get smooth, they are always pixelized.

If its possible, does anyone know how to get coasts like the style in this map, or at all? Usually I like the more realistic look, but I think the smoother coasts would be better for this one map.

I have PS CS5, GIMP, and Corel Painter (Student Edition), if it helps.

Thanks!

[Sular]

I've had pretty good results in photoshop by drawing the outline of the coast, selecting the area outside it with the magic wand, inverting the selection (this allows for fewer steps if you enjoy having lots of islands), and then playing around with the smoothing, expanding, and contracting before finally painting the land color on a separate layer. It leaves a fairly smooth looking shape for the land with a minimum of fiddling around.

[jfrazierjr]

Post an image. Typically, I (using GIMP) use RobA's coastline tutorial process. Of course, it also depends on if your doing print or web and the size. If you are printing out an image at 100(or less) DPI, then yea, things will look really crappy.

[Alex]

@Sular

Oh, so if I understand right, you use the expanding etc etc tool and then with the selection you fill in the land? I'll try it out next.

@jfrazierjr:
I too have used that tutorial, but the end results leave the image even more pixelized or clouded, if that makes sense?

Sure, here is an image of some of the coast line (my map is pretty big ). I tried the threshold option and even messed around with the settings, and I tried blurring it even. But nothing seems to be working for me...

[Sular]

Alex: Yes, that's more or less what I do. Attached is an image of the results of such a method (sorry for the lack of an image before)

--

Edit: Alex, I hope you don't mind, I've taken the liberty to fiddling with your image using my method and I've attached the results. I did have to up the image size to a width of 1000 pixels in order to keep things smooth, but other than that, all I did was use the magic wand trick (with a smoothing of 1 px).

[Alex]

I do not mind at all.

That is SO much better than my version! I like the pixel look most of the time, but for this map, that's what I wanted to do!

Do you perhaps have a post explaining what you do in fuller detail then?

[Sular]

I don't have any in-depth explanations or descriptions of the process above as of yet. I can try and draft something up if that would be helpful though. If so, any input you have on what you would find useful would be very helpful as I've never really posted much in the way of such things.

Mostly, I just make liberal use of layers and the magic wand tool and fiddle about until I get results I like.

[Alex]

Oh yes, that would be very helpful.

Hmm...I am pretty much use to CS5, so explaining the tools wouldn't be necessary or anything. So anything or anyway you can explain how you got the above would be nice. I'm am not sure if there is anything else. Maybe including if this can be done on any size picture, or is there a default size...?

[Schwarzkreuz]

I just select the crappy pixel-landmass than I make a new layer and smooth the selection bye 2 pixels and fill in the new layer or Alphachanel with the now smooth lines. By the way I just found out myself to do so...

[Sular]

Alex, I hope the attached pair of images will be useful. All images were made in Photoshop 7 (I've used CS5 as well but I don't personally own a copy, but the general results should be similar.)

The image itself is 1400x1400 pixels. The outline was drawn with a 3px round brush using just a mouse on a separate layer. I then selected the the the area outside the outline (the "water" if you will) with the magic wand tool. I then inverted the selection, smoothed the selection under Select > Modify > Smooth by two px. On a new layer I painted the landmass green with a large brush.

As you can see, some of the coastline details from the outline are lost in the process. If you spend a lot of time selecting tiny areas carefully, and/or selecting inside the outlines to see if that returns a better result, you can generally get a fairly close approximation of the what your outline originally looked like.

I hope this is useful.