Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator which is better for Mapping????

[guyanonymous]

I hadn't noticed such a limitation. But I generally don't trace with the pen tool--I use the pencil. Are you using an older version? Or maybe it's just a limit with bezier curves; they do need a bit of computation to display.

It's been over a year now (CS4 is what I've been using), but even the pencil had limitations if you go long enough...I believe it starts removing/averaging points starting at the beginning of your pencil tracing and following through, though I could be mis-remembering that aspect.

I'll have to go back and experiment some more....after my initial frustrations (lots of time lost tracing to no avail) and experiments to test things, I've not returned to see if things have changed.

[Midgardsormr]

Interesting. I did my Wheel of Time map in CS3 and used the Pencil to trace the entire coastline without problem. I'll have to look into it once my computer is set up again and see if I can find where the limit is.

It's also possible that it's a memory issue. I have 12 GB available, so I might not run into it if CS3 was 64-bit. I don't recall if it was or not. I know Photoshop was, but I'm not sure about Illustrator.

[Gidde]

Wow, software limitations aside, I'm impressed that you had the patience to trace the entire coastline at once. Back in the day when tracing coastlines with CC, I had to do it in several stretches of pencil then merge them all after the fact or my eyes/hand would go buggy. //EDIT: I just realized that I was doing that with a mouse, which made the process more onerous. Perhaps it'd be easier with the tablet.

[guyanonymous]

It's possible I'm mis-remembering, as it has been a while. I do remember the cramp hand after holding down the mouse button for an hour though! The tracing in one go, I think, was my last attempt after joining shorter tracing snippets ended in AI saying no. I do need to revisit sometime, but for now I'm happy to put those horrible memories behind me

[Midgardsormr]

Yeah, the tablet makes things much easier. Without it, I'd have probably tried to get a good alpha from Photoshop and imported it for a live trace. That may still have been a better solution, but I dislike cleaning up all the weirdness live trace leaves behind.