[Award Winner] Antique-style maps in Photoshop

[mrrkyl]

Looks like you've done a nice job and Tear's mountains look pretty cool here - almost like a shaded relief map. I have no idea what pattern set the pattern is in, my brain is getting old. I know I made my own, various sizes and scales, so you can always do that but here's the one I used for this - it's 5 x 5 pixels (very small).

Thanks for the input and example; I should get some practice creating my own patterns so why not start now? I was trying to use Tear's mountains to illustrate the hundreds of tiny lines used on this map but I can see them working as shaded relief.

[Katto]

You can generate different stripe patterns here for use in PS:

http://www.stripegenerator.com/

[mrrkyl]

Nice! Thank you for the link.

[Fallout]

Hi, I'm going through the tutorial right now. I'm at the part where you add the pattern overlay to the countries but I can't seem to find the one with the diagonal lines...checked every set of patterns and can't find it. Also, the borders on my country have no inner glow. How do I get it so that country borders have the inner glow? Any idea where I went wrong?

[Ascension]

As for the pattern, it's there in post #112, any white between borders is because you need to leave the initial black line (it should be a 1 pixel wide line and therefore almost unnoticeable), inner glows = no...should be a full solid color that is then selected, contracted (say 10 pixels), feathered (10 pixels), and the middle is deleted leaving a glowlike appearance.

[Fallout]

My gradient overlay is not showing up very well for the ocean. I can't see the blue/pink come through at all. Possibly a layer problem? I have it within the "Main Map" folder which is in the order of: Land, Noise, Ocean, White.

[TheMarcus7]

Okay I've gotten to step 10:
"10. Let’s add some cities now. Change back to the pencil and grab the hard round 5-pixels tip. Click on the
“mountains” layer and create a new layer, rename it to “cities”. Put a dot wherever you want it. On the layers palette,
right click on this layer and choose “Paste layer style” (this puts that 1-pixel black stroke around the dot and makes
the dot itself invisible). Since this is supposed to be something more modern we will need lots of cities and towns…we
do not need to make this a sparsely settled map like we would for something medieval. Also, what makes this style
map seem nice is the sheer amount of text on it, but I’ll get to that later…for now put in lots of dots. We will only
name cities and towns so don’t worry about that too much…yet. I put dots at every river delta, wherever two rivers
meet, and then wherever seems kind of empty ((pic antique 16))."

I'm not sure why, but when I right-click to select the cities layer I made, I don't see "Paste layer style" as an option. I've messed around and found I can use Select Pixels to select all the dots, but using Layer Style > Stroke just makes the dots bigger. I think I missed a step somewhere or part of a process.

.TM7

[Ascension]

Most likely. Check the earlier steps to see what the layer style is so that you can apply it to the dots.

[TheMarcus7]

I'm not finding it. What layer style can one paste that puts an n pixel stroke around an object and knocks the object out at the same time?

.TM7

[Coyotemax]

If you put the stroke, that one is obvious. the other one is not so much - look up near the top of the layer palette and look for the Fill percentage - default is 100% so it's completely opaque. Changing this value changes the opacity of the object on the layer, so if you set it to 0% it will turn the object transparent without affecting the layer style.

that setting will copy and paste as part of the overall layer style.