Sorry, I also made some bad puns in another thread about stirring music but I think I got away with that
Mouse you really are a gem hereYou seem to have this knack of educating that encourages discovery rather than totally showing how something is done. How do I nominate you for an award?
Ummm.... I think we all do it, really, so you'd have to give everyone an award
When you also become an expert chatterbox like me (over 1000 comments) you should by then have picked up enough tricks and tips to be able to help more recent newcomers yourself every now and then. That's how it works
EDIT: Besides - It's almost an irresistible urge to offer help where you can see that it might actually be of some practical use. Most people like making other people happy
Last edited by Mouse; 11-19-2016 at 05:20 PM.
OK so I redid the mountain outlines and main ridges with a thicker pen then reduced the whole thing by half. Is this better?
The general clarity is a big improvement, Straf, but the map as a whole is very small.
That means that sadly I can't really comment either way on the quality of your mountains.
How big is your benchtop map?
I use CC3+ which is vector drawing software (FastCAD to be precise) so I can render at any size I see fit without loss for the most part, but I think non vector software like PS and GIMP the drawing has a set size in pixels, doesn't it?
What's the size of the map your actually drawing on in pixels? I worked it out that if the map you have just uploaded was 50% the size of your original, then the original must only be about 800 pixels wide and just over 1000 pixels tall, which I'm willing to wager is really quite small compared to most PS or GIMP maps.
I would think from the resolution of other maps I've seen here at the Guild that you might consider resampling the entire original up to about 4000 pi x 3000 pi, and from that upload down-sampled images that are about 2000 x 1500, which in non-compressed JPEG form are easily within the upload limit of about 9-10 MB.
Working on a larger original would also make it a lot easier to draw!
However, if you want to continue working with it the way that it is, then it would probably be better to just simply upload it without any downsampling or resampling at all - so that its big enough for us to see all the very hard work you have put into it.
EDIT: If you were taking the images I uploaded here as a guide to what might be a proper size for a map, please don't. These are postage stamp size compared to the maps I upload, and were intended only as an example to demonstrate the effects of compressing an image.
Last edited by Mouse; 11-20-2016 at 04:08 PM.
My original was 1200 x 1600 and I scaled it down to 600 x 800, or at least that's what I think I did. I noticed how small it turned out to be so I fiddled a bit and decided to scale up to 1800 x 2400. GIMP then screamed at me that it's going to exceed the memory constraints so I went into its settings and gave it a boost. It calmed down a bit. Anyway I've gone to 2250 x 3000 now and it seems quite happy.
I'm afraid I've been a bit conservative with the files sizes. 9-10MB? I've been working on keeping everything below 2 !!! So here is an uncompressed jpg of the 1.8kp x 2.4kp:
Oh yeah, things were getting a bit waterlogged in places so I dug some drainage channels. I may fill some in and dig some new ones once I get the feel of the way the land will drain into the major basins.
Last edited by Straf; 11-20-2016 at 04:19 PM.
Ah-ha!
I see it now
But you are going to hate me so much now, because now that its large enough for me to see what you have drawn (and of course it looks slightly pixelated because you have enlarged the original) the mountain lines are just a shade on the heavy side.
Don't get me wrong. They're really well drawn mountains, so you could just trace over the lines you have already drawn, but using a fresh layer to draw them on - with thinner lines? This will also improve the quality of the drawing, since anything you draw from this point on will be drawn on the larger map and look cleaner and sharper than the things you drew on it before you enlarged it.
If you decide to do go ahead with the idea, I would recommend using a more neutral colour than blue, because it will help establish the difference between the line work of your mountains, and the line work of your rivers and drainage ditches.
The guy who's drawing the map only has blue ink I think. He watered it down a lot to do the sea.
What I mean is I only really wanted to use the one colour on this and I think blue works better on the yellow of the parchment layer. I could try a more grey tone.
A less saturated blue would be more restful on the eye, certainly
Sorry I don't understand what is meant by 'saturated'. Is it lighter or darker? Or just less 'blue'?
English phone box red is about the most saturated red I can think of right now. But if you were to take a black and white photograph it would look a very ordinary grey. If you were to merge this black and white photograph with a full colour image of the same phone box, you would get one that is half way between red and the corresponding grey tone of the b/w photo. That would be a half saturated red.
Reducing saturation is increasing the amount of same-tone grey in a colour - not to be confused with just adding black or white, which (although doing so also reduces the colour saturation by weakening it) is also more importantly a tonal difference that can take the colour all the way from near white to almost black.
The short answer is - I was agreeing with you that it might be better to use a greyer blue
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