How do I go about scaling down a continent map to a Country map

[The Great Fry]

Hello all, I tired messing around with scaling down my map to just a country so I can get some more detail and add smaller things. I'm using Photoshop and tired just duplicating the layers and deleting everything that was not apart of the country I wanted but the scale was all messed up. So how do I scale down a map to a smaller scale?

Thanks.

[Deadshade]

Cutting out the zone of interest and zooming on it ?

[Hai-Etlik]

Describing the scale as "all messed up" is extremely vague so it's not clear what the problem is.

In cartography, "scale" is the size you draw things, not the size of the area you care covering. "Small scale" maps cover a large area that's drawn small. "Large scale" maps cover a smaller area, that's drawn larger. The area you cover with a map is the "extent".

If you are using a spherical (or approximately spherical) world and drawing your maps correctly, there will be distortion. If you choose a projection suitable to the extent and purpose of the map, this will be minimized over that extent. If you change extent, you need to reproject to a projection appropriate to that new extent. A projection that works well for the whole world (Like Winkel Tripel), probably isn't going to be good for just Canada, a projection good for all of Canada (Like Statistics Canada Lambert Conformal Conic), isn't going to be good for British Columbia, and a projection good for British Columbia (Like BC Albers Equal Area Conic) isn't necessarily going to work for the Okanagan Valley. Meanwhile a projection that's good for the Okanagan (like UTM Zone 11 N) is going to be horrible for larger areas. If you weren't familiar with this, then you probably wouldn't have noticed this problem so it's probably not what you are talking about though.

EckertIII.pngamericas-stereo.pngnorthamerica.pngcanada.pngBC-albers.pngkelowna.png

[Midgardsormr]

That was a very long and complex way to request more information!

Fry, if you could post some images to show us the problem, we'll probably be able to give more useful advice.