Regional map: a recently settled land

[jfrazierjr]

I replaced the pic of the first post of this thread with an improved version:

- the colors of some symbols were smudged in the GIMP, as recommended by jfrazierjr. I did not get results as clean as seen in the examples he showed in his post, but it does break the monotony of repeating symbols and looks a little bit less "copy / paste".

- the border received a couple of effects in CC3. It was looking a little bit "too perfect" for a supposedly hand-drawn map.

Looks like map creation in CC3 + final fine tuning in GIMP will become my standard operating procedure.

Use the blur tool in addition to the smudge tool to help make it look better. What really bothered me the most, but not what I did in my "redo" was the rocks in the ocean... those contrasting blues(symbol vs background) was what drove me kind of crazy to start with.

One thing I have heard a lot of is that CC can't AA text for spit, so a lot of people leave labeling for a third party application such as GIMP... Gandwarf in particular has gotten some good results there....

[Volsung]

Overall Nicely done map.

I do like the mountains. Better than what I have been able to manage so far anyway, but that is what I get for using a raster program I guess...

Other than some of the things already mentioned, I would only add that the text just doesn't seem to match up with the cities/mountains. The text is blurred slightly, which doesn't seem to me to fit with the mountains and cities, which are very sharp.

[Midgardsormr]

CC can't AA text for spit,

To clarify that, "AA" stands for anti-alias, which is the effect of adding some intermediate colors along the edge of a line to smooth out the "jaggies."

[Fabrice]

Since Volsung pointed out the blur on text, it became obvious (distracting, even) to me as well.

So I removed this effect from the CC3 map, exported it again and honed my skills at smudge & blur in GIMP once more.

I still need some practice to it but it looks better this time (I might be the only one to see any difference, but please do not shatter my dreams ).

I did some anti-aliasing in GIMP as well (thanks for the translation Midgard, I am still quite new to all of this).