Fixing a zoomed-in map that has become pixellated?

[Brian Leybourne]

Hi all,

I made a map which I am pretty happy with (using salderan). It's a whole world.

Now, I want to zoom into a specific continent and work on adding detail to that part of the map, but of course with the zoom, it looks a bit pixellated (even though I did the base map really large in preparation for this).

Can any photoshop wizards tell me if theres a way to "fix" the zoomed in view to remove the pixellation? I have tried a combination of the sharpen and smooth filters but it doesn't really help.

Any advice appreciated...

Thanks,
Brian

[Azélor]

There are no really good solution to this. It will be blurry because photoshop can't autogenerate the missing information.

You could try to vectorize it, stretch it, then repixelate it, but it also gives messy results.

[Brian Leybourne]

Bugger, I was hoping there was a better solution :-/

I was thinking something along the lines of doubling the size of the image, so that every pixel becomes 4 pixels in a 2x2 (or even further, making every pixel 3x3 or 4x4 even) and then going through what would essentially be an antialiasing process to smoth them back down, is theree any way to do this in photoshop? (I have CS5)

[waldronate]

Read http://www.cartographersguild.com/tu...explained.html for some good background on the subject of how bitmapped images work.

Remember, a map is an abstraction of the real world drawn for a purpose. One of the most important elements of making related maps at different scales is what to include and what not to include at each of the different levels. A country lane, for example, will be included on a town and possibly local scale, but is unlikely to be included on a country, continental, or world scale.

For best effect, you should probably just crop out the area that you're interested in, put that on a background layer to act as a guide, and then draw your new map on top of it. It's more work, but far easier than trying to find a magic technique to put in fake information that's not in the original drawing.

[waldronate]

Bugger, I was hoping there was a better solution :-/

I was thinking something along the lines of doubling the size of the image, so that every pixel becomes 4 pixels in a 2x2 (or even further, making every pixel 3x3 or 4x4 even) and then going through what would essentially be an antialiasing process to smoth them back down, is theree any way to do this in photoshop? (I have CS5)

Using bicubic sampling in Photoshop will do antialiasing for you. However, you'll need to do all manner of level adjustment to try to get things crisper. For certain kinds of line images, vectorizing using something like Illustrator and rescaling may work well or it may work badly. I think this part is where the "well you should have done it as a vector drawing" camp may come rushing in.

[Brian Leybourne]

Thanks for the replies, I think you're right - the best method is probably going to be to redraw each island/continent using a cropped/zoomed image of it from the base map as a guide. I guess I'm going to have to learn how to become a lot more artistic suddenly :-/

[Naima]

Do you have blurred edges of coast or sharp pixellated one?

To have a new board u could try add special effect stroke , chose the size and color then rasterize layer and select only. The colored part invert and erase the rest .

[waldronate]

I guess I'm going to have to learn how to become a lot more artistic suddenly :-/

Skill = Talent * Practice

[Brian Leybourne]

Skill = Talent * Practice

Yeah, but talent is 0 in my case. And we all know what happens when anything is multiplied with 0, right...? :-/

[Brian Leybourne]

Do you have blurred edges of coast or sharp pixellated one?

To have a new board u could try add special effect stroke , chose the size and color then rasterize layer and select only. The colored part invert and erase the rest .

I'm aware of the tool and the terms you mention but not really what you said to do :-) I'll have a play with them and see what I can come up with though, thanks!