WIP - First attempt at a map, feedback appreciated! ^.^

[Svea]

Hello everyone!

Totally new to this whole cartography thing, but finding it surprisingly enjoyable.
I was doing some worldbuilding with a friend and we decided that we needed a map,
and since I had photoshop I figured I'd try to make one. After a bit of youtubing
and googling, I found this place and boy was there much info here!

So! I followed Ascensions tutorial as well as a few others and after a few hours
I had something that actually looked like a map .. kinda.

http://imgur.com/gJCNlzy (It's a quite big image, so you can zoom a lot)

I was wondering a few things though;
1) Whats your gut reaction to the image? Anything that stands out that needs to be fixed?
2) I am not that happy with how the mountains turned out, as I have only tweaked the
settings from the ascension tutorial as well as added a texture. I want to make them more distinct,
anyone have an idea on that? Maybe change colour?
3) I was wondering how to make prominent forests on this map? Making the green colour darker did not seem
to work, but unsure if adding a texture with the pattern stamp tool is really the way to go. Anyone got ideas?
4) Things to add that would make it look more like a map instead of a satellite image? I was
thinking on borders, maybe a compass and some cities. But also more fantasy elements, like a maelstrom
or such. Anyone know where I could get my hands on some free icons or such?
5) General tips that could improve the image. Maybe interesting filters or such in photoshop.
6) Is the overall colouring/tone of the land and sea ok?

Thanks so much in advance! This website is amazing and it would have taken me countless hours to get where I am now without it!

---EDIT----

Made v2 of the map. Tried some new textures and colours
http://i.imgur.com/M1Qpr1e.jpg

[Chick]

Hello, Svea, welcome to the Guild!

That is a very nice job with the Atlas style, and awesome for a first attempt with it! I'm definitely looking forward to seeing more of your work!

[Wingshaw]

G'day Svea, and welcome to the Guild.

Nice job with that map (have some rep for including a map in your first post).

To answer some of your questions:
--My gut reaction is that it is good, but the landshapes are a bit uninteresting; the oceans look a bit weird to me (too dark and too blue, in my opinion, and I'm not a fan of the undisguised use of filter > clouds); the mountain ranges are fine in style, but problematic in position (there are no ranges to imply tectonic movement, which would add substantially to realism).
--See my above point for mountains (and, as I always say, do some research: check out how mountain ranges are positioned on earth).
--Forests? No idea. Sorry. I'd avoid the pattern stamp tool though, if I were you; I don't trust that tool.
--cities, national borders, rivers, roads, a map border, legend, title, etc. That would enhance the mappiness of the image. With this style, you are probably better off using highly stylised symbols (eg. simple dots for cities, rather than pictographs of buildings). As for the maelstrom idea, unless it is needed for your workd-building, I'd recommend looking for something more original. Maelstroms are a bit of a cliche. Why not, for example, giant craters, glaciers, hardened lava flows etc. There are many options.
--I think you should try opening the filter gallery, and just experimenting with some of the options. One thing that might work is to make the image look more artistic and less computer made by running a watercolour/paint daubs filter. Another possibility would be to copy the image into a new flattened layer, apply something like graphic pen filter, and then overlay over the original layers below. Things like that would be worthwhile, in my opinion.
--Tone of land is fine; see my first comment for the sea. If possible, I'd recommend reducing the presence of the cloud on both land and sea. Maybe just cut the opacity if you can.

Hope that's helpful.

THW

[Svea]

Wow! Those were some fast comments!
Thanks to both of you!


My initial thoughts with the map was to try and give it this kind of look
http://britton.disted.camosun.bc.ca/...h-map-huge.jpg

Especially for the green parts if you look at say sub-saharan Afrika. I think it looks really cool, looks very real but also stylized. And yes, there is a lot of cloud filters in there
since I kinda only followed the tutorial and I dunno what else to do yet! ^^ And as for the colours of the ocean, yeah, they are very dark! I took some inspiration from that
picture above, which is also very dark, thought it would look more realistic. (Thought process was to kinda make it realistic and then apply some kind of filter)

As for the tectonic plates .. wow, I did not even think about that. ^^ What happened was me and my friend drawing up the map on a piece of paper and then me just putting mountains
where we placed them on the picture. I can see what you mean though, they are really all over the place.

Also .. "mappiness" Very good word, think I'll steal that! ^.~

And I guess that a maelstrom is cliché indeed .. perhaps thats why we thought of it. But just something to put in the water that's not an island y'know. Thought it would be nice.
Thanks for the other tips too! I'll see if I can't poke around with them and see what I come up with, will update soon!

Thanks so much!


----edit---
Also grats on your 500th post TheHoarseWhisperer ^^

[Wingshaw]

A few additional thoughts, Svea:
--to help your map match that Earth-image, the water is actually more turquoise than you have (yours is slightly closer to the purple end of the spectrum). It also goes from much darker (nearly black) to much lighter; that is something else you could try.
--one of the reasons I dislike the cloud filter is because of its randomness. Looking at that Earth-image, the differences in tone in the sea are due to underwater features, like trenches and ridges: lighter areas are shallower than dark areas. Clouds, however, just put blobs of darkness in a random way across the whole area.
--when you want to emulate an image (like the satellite Earth image), one thing you can do is open it in Photoshop (either a separate file, or a layer in the original) and use the eye-dropper tool to match colours exactly. Just something to consider.

----edit---
Also grats on your 500th post TheHoarseWhisperer ^^

--thanks; I hadn't even noticed.

THW

[Ascension]

On earth forests cover so much land that it's kind of hard to really differentiate land from plains in satellite style. All you can really do to that end is darken the forest areas and/or lighten the plains areas (airbrush on a new layer). Avoid texturing the forests or using pattern overlays or patterned bevels - looks too fake and anyone familiar with Photoshop will immediately spot those things. Same goes for the ocean unless you intend to show the bathymetry (underwater elevations). Keep your ocean a dark dark teal except where you want to show shallows and then go a light aqua. For mountains, play around with every possible technique or combination of techniques you can dream up - that's what I did. You could start with the bevel/emboss and maybe extend that outward to show more slope but try not to overdo it. The mountains are the best I have come up with to this point (which was about 5 years ago and I haven't experimented since so if you find a better way I'd certainly be interested).

[Svea]

Wow Ascension himself ;3 Thanks so much for your tutorial, learned a lot from it!
I realize that perhaps yes, the water is almost purple, could easily change that!
I also think that perhaps the mountains will simply look better if I change their colour
as well, perhaps a dark gray with just a tint of brown.

As for the forests, perhaps you are right, it would be hard enough to do them!


As for the cloud filter issue, what other ways could I make a nice texture that is (seemingly) rather random?
For both the oceans and the land, it am so-so with how it looks, and have been tinkering with other ways of
getting it to look good.


Hehe, I am kinda curious to just post the black & white layer so you guys can tinker with it too! Would be ubercool to see how
different people would tackle the same map! :O

Also I tried making borders, but it looks really bad to just paint on a 2px line. I don't want to colourize them like you did in your tutorial
so I was wondering if there are any other ways of making them?

Thanks y'll so much for all your tips and help! Been a great learning experience ^_^

[Svea]

Don't wanna doublepost but made a new version of the map with another technique, lemme know what you guys think!
http://i.imgur.com/M1Qpr1e.jpg

Better or worse? And of course it's not done yet, very much wip ^^

[Wingshaw]

Definite improvement. Still a lot of work to do, though.

I took the liberty of making a few alterations to your map, to see how it might look. Just tried out a way of doing borders, indicated more probably areas for mountain ranges (essentially just making your ones longer, and connected together), and messed around with the sea. The attached image shows my efforts. It was done in about half an hour, clearly needs more work, and strangely seems to have changed colour a bit (becoming darker and more saturated) between the photoshop drawing and the final image. To make it look really good, the underwater trenches and ridges would need to be carefully painted in, but that would take too much time for me, at present.

Anyway, if you like the changes I made, I can tell you how I did them, so you can try.

By the way, it is usually a good idea to post your maps directly to the CG, rather than an external site.

THW

[Svea]

Damn those borders looks a lot nicer than mine! I tried to PM you but seems I can't do that just yet, but yeah, I'd absolutely love to know how you did those!
And as for the mountains, I can easily make that happen, as I said in an earlier post, I did not even start to consider how mountains are "made" so to speak, so
all good, again, thanks!

The water is very dark, but I like the effects you placed on it, and would love to know how you did that. Some kind of blur? Also just saw the texture there, looks
really cool, but will it look as nice with a lighter ocean tone though? Perhaps not as dark as yours, but not as bright as I made mine in the v2 either.

And about the uplaod, had no idea you could do that to this site! ^^