Quote Originally Posted by Fabrice View Post
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....