Reply With QuoteConsidering I’m new here, I think it’s looking good so far.
My second sandbox map - please critique
One year later, I have made a second attempt at a map in Photoshop (this was the first attempt: https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...39536&p=357103 ....yikes!). Feedback and resources from this community have been very helpful in the time between the two maps, so thank you.
I wanted to stop here and gather some feedback on what I have thus far. Please give me feedback on anything that catches your eye, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Especially land texturing, as I am not very happy with the way my snowy region is turning out.
Considering I’m new here, I think it’s looking good so far.
Thanks KC.
Bumping for more feedback
That looks like a great start! Your mountains especially are lovely, and I like the texturing on both the land and sea (especially the subtle texturing on the sea). The snowy region looks fairly nicely shaded too; the one thing I'd pay attention to is making sure it doesn't give the impression that the shading isn't respecting the mountain lines in the same area.
One thing I did notice (because I've run into similar issues in some of my maps before) is that the coastlines are very hard lines with stark pixel edges/aliasing issues. I'm used to working in the GIMP and not Photoshop when it comes to raster editing, and I've found automated methods for fixing that to be a bit lackluster, so I'm a little short on suggestions to actually fix it. It looks like your earlier mapping attempt on here also had that come up, and it was mentioned there that you might try using a (slightly) less-than-100-hardness brush to do the coastlines?
Thanks for the feedback! On this one, can you elaborate? Are you saying the shading and the mountain lines don't blend together well? If so I agree. If not, let me know what you mean. Either way, any tips on fixing?Originally Posted by AzureWings
Do you mean less than 100% opacity? For brushes I have 'hard' and 'soft' and the number, as far as I understand, just translates to the size, of which mine I think is less than 5.
By the way, I like your icon. What is that from?
It might be that the 'shading' of the snowcaps and the snow shading of the surrounding land blend together too well, actually. In some places at first glance it looks like you have the background land's snow moving "through" the mountain lines, instead of having mountains with snowcaps in front of snowy terrain, and it might help if you could introduce a little more discontinuity between the snowy land shading and the mountain peaks. Near the bottom-right of the mountains for example you have a small snowcap with snow also "behind" it where the eye might connect the two masses of snow and make the mountain seem odd. Basically - there's a small extent to which first impressions can make it seem like the white of the snowy terrain was just drawn across the mountain lines with no regard for the mountains being there (which obviously isn't the case on closer inspection, of course). It's not too severe, but in my opinion it might be something to think about.
Not opacity, exactly, I mean the hardness of the brush shape (which on a bit of looking things up might not be expressed as a number in Photoshop; oops?). A (very slightly) fuzzy-edged as opposed to hard-edged brush might help avoid the hard pixelated edge to the coastlines. Apparently there's a hotkey to tweak the brush hardness in CS6 Photoshop if you hold Shift and press the left/right bracket keys ('[' and ']')?
It's just a little shield I made up to be my forum avatar based on my username. My first map I posted on the forum also had a neat little effect I'd trial-and-error'd up for ocean texturing, so I incorporated that effect into the field of the shield.
Got it! I'll have to play with the first part of that.
I found what you mean on the hardness. That hotkey didn't work but in PS Elements you can click Brush Settings and then toggle the hardness of the brush from 0-100. So thanks for teaching me something new!
