[Award Winner] Making maps in Photoshop

Hi there.

I discovered this forum a week or so ago. A great place! I've been doing some tutorials, originally inspired by fellow creative writers over at the Chronicles Network as we were talking about Map making there on a map creation thread and this map thread.

Since being here at CG it's pretty clear how little I know! Wilbur was a brilliant find and I'm looking forward to going through the other tutorials here and checking out various software.

So without further a-do, here are the tutorials...



Turning your hand drawn sketch into a detailed alpha map

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A Basic Alpha Map

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Aged, Parchment with a creation method for mountain ranges, trees and trails.

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One of many options to colour your map

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4 ways to give your map a relief using height maps - using Wilbur for one of them.

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EDIT - the above are downloadable PDF documents. You can get a reader here


EDIT - Until further notice, this thread is the place to download them from, they no longer on my web site ,as it was more to showcase my portfolio to get a job, I just havent had time to provide a space for them. You can always contact me should they break here or something. If I dont get back within a week, then send another - you're email's probably got lost in my junk mail, I'll always respond to fellow creators if I spot ya :)

please note: my website is now is now located @ jez-elf.com (NOT jezelf.co.uk as stated on the tutorials - you'll get a dead link)...I've gone global :)





Thanks for your interest in them!

Cheers

Jez

OMG! I love the 'blur sketchy colours' step ! What a great way of getting gradients without having to use them and getting a lot more control besides! That tip by itself is pure golddust not to mention the rest of the tutorials which are fantastic.

Have 5 stars! I wish I could give you more!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ravells

OMG! I love the 'blur sketchy colours' step ! What a great way of getting gradients without having to use them and getting a lot more control besides! That tip by itself is pure golddust not to mention the rest of the tutorials which are fantastic.

Have 5 stars! I wish I could give you more!

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You could give him one of those new fangled tut author icon things....

I could...but once there's 5 stars by the tutorial....get rating everybody! Once 5 people have rated the tutorial at 5 stars, jezelf gets an icon.

...it's to ensure that the icon grant is community driven rather than just on the whims of the CLs

Quote:

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Originally Posted by ravells

I could...but once there's 5 stars by the tutorial....get rating everybody! Once 5 people have rated the tutorial at 5 stars, jezelf gets an icon.

...it's to ensure that the icon grant is community driven rather than just on the whims of the CLs

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Rated and Repped the post(er)!

Very helpful and readable tutorial. You got some great results playing with settings I rarely poke at with photography. Really neat stuff. I was thinking about doing some maps straight in photoshop but was struggling with randomness, you have given me what I needed to get poking away here.

Thanks for some great tips. This will come very usefull in the future.

cheers :-)

:D woo-hoo! I got an award! Cool! - Thank you for that, and the stars! Nice surprise. Glad to hear the tutorials are helpful to you.

Also happy to hear it's readable - a few typos slipped through I noticed, so I'll go through and sort them out this weekend (sorry anout those). I feel it's probably too verbose but I like to try and write a tutorial as if my own feeble mind was going to follow it. Sometimes I can get stumped at the first step as I try to navigate around various programs UIs and termology.

The great thing about this place is that there are so many handy tutorials. I've always been a firm believer in sharing knowledge ( from personal experience of trying to work things out and wasting so much time on trial and error). It also good discovering new things - from that I didn't know were possible and within my current skill, to learning new stuff to raise it.

Tancread: I noticed that ViewDale - Instant Island (Thanks to Redrobes for that one ) could give similar results than going through all the Difference Clouds thing I mention. You can then import it into PS and use levels on it. The added advantage of using Instant Island is that it also generates a height map. ( BTW, II saves your created file to C:\Program Files\ViewingDale folder - It wasn't obvious to my feeble mind at first :) )

cheers!
Jez

Thanks for the tip, playing with the island generator now.

Just wanted to point out this tutorial for gimp (which should be transferable to photoshop) on creating not so random coastlines. It is a bit easier than the cut/paste/rotate/fit process you follow.

You could also probably apply a difference clouds several times at step 4 to make it a bit rougher, but you would want to make the initial blur smaller.

-Rob A>