Hand drawn style?

[Jykke]

The overall style looks quite nice actually.

What if you resolved the roughness issue by resizing the land layer to 2x it's current size, add gaussian blur with 7-8px blur (if it's on transparent layer, merge it with a complete white layer), adjust exposure to around +(2-3), offset (same place as exposure) to around -0.5, adjust the rest blurryness to reasonable level with curves (output 0, input 200), select color range (land layer color) and adjust fuzziness so that all land gets selected, inverse and delete the white part out. Resize back to normal.. and you should have a sharp coastline. Downside is that you might lose some minor detail with the technique. OR, you could just leave it as it is

[ravells]

Thanks for all the advice guys (Pasis - you have more faith in me than I have). Believe me, once the baby arrive all my free time will vanish (i'm on a semi-break right now) so I'm making the most of it while I can.

Jykke thanks for the tip, but I'm not using photoshop but Drawplus X3 - it's not bad, but it doesn't quite have all the little bits and peices that PS has (including exposure correction) and has a tendency to crash if the filesize gets too big. I've put in some sea lines...any better?

All the best

[Jykke]

ah, I just assumed so as you have Photoshop CS2 listed on your software And it's looking better now I have to say. I can imagine that the full size map will be just awesome!

[ravells]

Ah I need to change that. I'm waiting for CS4 but until it arrives I'm stuck with Photoplus...which is a pretty good package for the price!

[Greason Wolfe]

Looks to me like you're on the right track for what you want to accomplish. No real concerns, but there is a curiosity.

Assuming you're going for the parchment look and all, I like the subtle shadows going on in the background. I'm also seeing horizontal lines (again, shadowed) that are occurring with a pretty regular frequency. An intended effect or an artifact of some sort?

GW

[ravells]

Thanks GW, it's intended, meant to be the grain of the paper...perhaps its too obvious.

[Greason Wolfe]

Thanks GW, it's intended, meant to be the grain of the paper...perhaps its too obvious.

Naw, don't think it is too obvious, at least not for most, I sort of fixate on things like that from time to time.

GW

[ravells]

LOL well it's less obvious when you look at the map full size (you're looking at a crop of a small part of it).

[ravells]

Just going generally mad now...a break called for I think.

[pasis]

Ok I'm starting to see where you are aiming at...Looking good