Hello dear all,

...I am a total Newbie in painting good looking maps - in past and currently I use only pen and paper and Inkscape. I created maps for private use in my fantasy roleplay games. Now I will improve my map painting. I tested in the last weeks some programms for Mac - f. e. Seashore, Gimp, Pixelmator, Corel 11 (which is the last nativ Corel for Mac) and Adobe Photoshop Elements 6; and at the moment I prefer Adobe's application. I find some interesting plug ins - like Grant tools for PSE 6; there I get a plugin that I can use masks and other interesting things on in PSE 6 and other more - a great software extension for PSE 6.

Unfortunately I am not a student :-), so at the moment I am not sure, that Adobe's Photoshop CS4 is the best solution. The price here in Germany is not really fine; the cheapest price is EUR 910,00. And older versions like PS 7 needs the classic OS 9 system (which I can not install on Intel Mac) or CS2 (is not supported in Leopard, the current OS) by Adobe does not really work fine. And - I only need this programm for maps, I am not really interested in photos or so. Due to these reasons I try now to use the small brother of the big CS.

My question here - who uses Adobe PSE, too? Who made maps with this application? Do anyone have tutorials to create maps with PSE (many settings from the tutorials for PS CS does not really work in PSE)?

Thank you
& best regards

Vanderil