Hi Ravells,

thank you for four advice!

Playing with the outlines option is a very good idea, it really helps the final map. Unfortunately its to late to do it for my current map- since I did not know nor searched the save city function in City Creator I only have the city as a picture. One of the more epic failures in my workflow...

I checked out the tree thing. It looks very promising but I still have to check if I can incorporate the wood carving effect with it. I will keep you updated!

I think using the magic wand is THE time saver in the whole approach. Changing color before exporting the file is key to success. How do you export your images from the program? I just did a 2600x2600 pic, that turned out to be to graini for some effects, antialiasing in special. I will do a greater pic size next time, even though I have to find out how to reasamble the picture sinc I will need to export in in different parts.

The woodcut effect is based on a tutorial from this forum.

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@kestrelgrey: I will search for that tutorial. Sounds promising! Working with shades of grey is a nice idea- I am going to try this out next time. I tried it on this map to but lighning certain layers did not worked very well after the woodcut effect was applied, since it lights out the effect as well.

Does anybody know a way to take a layer and lightening darker areas more then areas that are already in a very light tone?

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@Lukc
As mentioned to ravells the city creator only allows for very small resolutions- 3200x3200 is the most you can get. On smaller resolutions Antialiasing wont do much good. Or am I doing something wrong? What resolution would you guys use on a map of the shown scale?

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Anyway, I tried to work with some color. At first I was not very pleased, but then I tried the overlay option on the colored layers and the result looks promising:

Click image for larger version. 

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Many thanks for all the positive feedback, really made me working on this more than I planned and it helped making the map better.