[Award Winner] Antique-style maps in Photoshop

**Steel General** · 01-15-2009, 09:49 AM

Thanks Vandy, meant to do that myself and forgot all about it.

**Ascension** · 01-15-2009, 05:11 PM

Thanks to both of you

**Eagleyes** · 04-20-2009, 01:12 PM

Hi, I'm new to photoshop but I loved your tutorial!! I am currently at the 21 step. I would like to know how can I make this scoll style background and this burned edges for my map like the first image you posted, can you teach me or show me a thread that theaches how to do this?

My map is like this:

**ravells** · 04-25-2009, 04:36 AM

I've just started this tutorial and the coast creation method is the best I've ever seen in photoshop - even easier than RobA's threshold technique. It's gold for that alone!!!

Eagleyes, here is a parchment tutorial: The advanced search tool is your friend!

Good luck with the parchment style!

**Ascension** · 04-25-2009, 08:40 AM

Oh man, I'm so sorry that I didn't get back to you sooner Eagleyes. I've been setting up a new pc and totally forgot. The link by Ravs is a really good tut; thanks, man. What I did was to just add an overlay of a paper texture then give it a layer style of inner glow. I think it's in the tut later on but in case it's not the inner glow is a black set to color burn. That's a nice compass you have there.

**m-boy** · 04-27-2009, 05:40 AM

Thanks a lot, Ascension

I just have to say that this is the best tutorial I've seen in a while ^_^
and the results are really professional looking - after creating such a map it's quite a pleasure to elaborate on the story for an unique RPG experience - it helps a lot to feel the proper atmosphere for the world setting that one's aiming for

Below I'm posting my result from following the tutorial steps, I didn't follow them very strictly and I skipped a few steps so I can spend more time on others, as I was aiming on a single island for a pirate adventure (rather than a whole continent with a number of countries)

Also worth mentioning is that the tutorial consists of many easy to follow steps and is very detailed making it so versatile that with it one can build anything he wishes for, even maps based on real world places, as I did: a real map of Jamaica and Port Royal was used as a reference (attached here too), it's very low resolution... that doesn't matter, though - resizing it and setting the opacity low was very helpful for step 4 (shaping the landmass); I just had to use very small brush for fine-tuning the contour where necessary

Well, sorry for this long post but I'm really happy with the things I learned from this tutorial and wanted to share the result
credits for the map go to the entire Cartographer's Guild as both the knowledge and the parchment texture used for the final touches were gained thru these forums

Btw, nice map, Eagleyes, you give me some good ideas for improving future maps (your mountains are very cool ^^)

Notes about the attachments:
1. Jamaica(wOpt).png => Final result! The PNG is optimized to be a small size (meaning there are less colours than supposed >.< so some of the effects look dull), if someone is interested I can post bigger versions (unoptimized is ~5 mb), or psd files;
2. Jamaica+Port Royal.jpg => as you see this map's resolution (island area) is just 300x150, that's the map I used as a reference in Photoshop; I now need a way to do the smaller Port Royal area
3. Jm-map.png => Modern map of Jamaica (from wikipedia), I'm putting it just for comparison with the next map, I saw it by the time I was doing the scale bar as I went to wikipedia to check the size of the island (it's 150 miles)
4. Jamaica-5.jpg => earlier version, without the old-paper-ish look, it really looks like a lot better version than the one in wikipedia ^^ (if you don't count some rivers and that Chi Gow village I added... and the mountains that are probably not there IRL lol)