Help me polish my map from the previous challenge?

[jshoer]

Hey everybody,

I had a great time with the last Lite Challenge. I drew a line-art map by hand (here's my progress thread) and then digitized it to put on labels. However, I'm not really happy with how the labelled version turned out. Maybe it's just too easy for me to look over and see the line art on paper, and than I think the physical map looks too good - but I think I can do a better job with the digital application of the labels.

Here's what I did: on a suggestion from ChickPea, I pulled the map into Inkscape and placed all the labels there. I put a white glow around them. Then I exported the label layer and put it on top of the map in GIMP so I could erase things to make room for the labels, tweak stuff, etc. I would love some suggestions for how to improve the results: better fonts to integrate with the hand-drawn base, better color selection, better label placement, better overlaying of the digital stuff on the image, whatever!

First of all, I'm interested in what you think about the digitized map. Which is best? Here it is as it stood at the end of the Lite Challenge. I had taken a scan, and then applied some blur to try and soften the edges:

Orihlam.png

Now here it is without the softening:

Orihlam_hard.png

Finally, today I took a photo as I usually do, and slid it under all the label stuff:

Orihlam_photo.png

(I know the photo variant has the legend out of order and the white glow around the labels is a little too apparent. But I think I like the underlying map best in that one.)

So what do you think? Putting digital labels on a hand-drawn map is the next step for Braid, too, so I want to get this right.

[johnvanvliet]

how are you scanning them ?
a flatbed scanner ?
and what software ?
-- if the junk windows preinstalled TRIAL garbage , then use something else

they SHOULD look almost exactly the same as a photo taken of it


both the top 2 are WAY too contrasty

for cleaning up line drawings ( mostly do to jpg compression artifacts ) i like to use the gimp "G'mic" plugin and use a bilateral PDE smoothing

[jshoer]

A flatbed, yeah. A few generations old, probably...

they SHOULD look almost exactly the same as a photo taken of it

That has never been my experience with a scanner. I've even taken some of my maps to Kinkos to get them scanned on the fancy equipment, and the colors and contrast come out all wrong.