Elyden: the Hinterlands of the East W.I.P

[vorropohaiah]

That's… quite a lot of pixels. 300 dpi is rather excessive for even a standard poster print, and that's large even by poster standards. Are you aiming merely to give yourself a lot of flexibility for the future, or is your intended presentation format a huge poster that viewers can view at less than arm's length?

yeah, the idea is to print them out at full-size for my study/gaming room (where they will serve the more functional purpose of being within reach whenever I'm writing and need quick points of reference). with the amount of locations and regions listed on them, a lot of the labels need to be quite small (9-point font) so the high-res helps.

Not that I object to lots of pixels, but it seems like it would be cumbersome to work with. Anyway, you might get better results from your rescale if you use a different filter. If you're using Photoshop, go to Edit > Preferences > General (Ctrl-K). In the Image Interpolation drop-down, try Bicubic Sharper. Recent versions of Photoshop conveniently give you hints as to which filter is best for certain tasks. It's usually best to leave it at Bicubic for general work, but if you're getting artifacts from a rescale, it can be worthwhile to try the others. Just don't forget to change it back when you're done.

yep, that's just how I resize them when minimizing, though keep n mind the colouring on the map is just a mock-up at this point. i work in B/W and then colourize once I'm done. even the original Elyden map I've posted elsewhere on this website isn't the 100% finished product as its constantly evolving as i write regional histories. Again, resizing a 400mb PSD into a 4.7mb jpg will leave you with some artifacts.