As Yet Unnamed Map - Basics

[Ryan K]

Good Afternoon fellow Cartographers,

I'm currently in the process of building a map for a world I am designing, and I am using a combination of Fractal Terrains with the aid of the Terraformer, and of course, Photoshop CS.

Usually when I am bringing a Fractal Terrain map into Photoshop, the next three hours is consumed by meticulously tracing the outline of every coast, island and lake, but since I woke up to myself and started playing around with light intensities in Fractal Terrains, exporting the two-toned image into Photoshop, running the Glowing Edges filter over it, inverting it and knocking off all the troublesome white-space, those days (and I do mean days) are far behind me.

The Terraformer package is the greatest thing since Fractal Terrains, of course, but an issue with one of the climatic images is that it tends to attribute the same texture to high-altitude, dry areas as it does to deserts. However, by blending this climatic image with some choice selections from the Gaia, the snowy mountains in the northern section of the map look like it has snow up there as opposed to cacti, rattlesnakes and Bedouin.

This image is basically I shot of how my planet is shaping up so far, but my future intentions for it are to create a much more scaled back, authentic looking hand-drawn map, with incomplete landmass depictions, compass rose, maybe a couple of sea-beasties.

My biggest problem is this:

I like how with Fractal Terrains that I can produce images up to 8000 pixels wide. I like excess. I like putting 1TB of memory to the test. And usually I can do that. If I wanted.

However, for whatever reasons unbeknown-st to me, if I so much as ask for a tiny image to be converted into .bmp, .jpg, .anything, Fractal Terrains tells me "Computer says no" and shuts down the program. Doesn't do it with any other many countless of other maps that I have scattered about my HDD, just the one that I desperately want to export for the love of God!!

So, I have had to settle for screen-capture resolution. Not happy, Jan.

Anyway, please have a look and let me know what you all reckon