[Award Winner] Antique-style maps in Photoshop

[jfrazierjr]

Beautiful map A. The one thing that bugs me, because I tried doing the exact same thing, is the rings around the landmass. They get too perfect and in contrast to the mountains you (and I, in my map) created they destroy the hand drawn look to the map. When I played with this idea in my map I tried everything but drawing the lines myself by hand. You figure if you smooth each ring it might look better but it doesn't and in the end I dropped the map completely until I had time to draw them by hand.

I have not tried it, but if you space the rings out a bit (at least 8-10 pixels from each other or more) you might be able to do a displacement map against each set of rings with a 1-2 px distort to get a slightly more varied line. Not sure what method A is doing as I have not read the whole thing yet, but if stroking a path, I know GIMP can emulate brush dynamics to vary stroke width during the stroke, so I assume PS can probably do that some to. That would also help make it look a bit more hand drawn with the varied line sizes.

[Ascension]

Bohunk -- I haven't tried this yet, but I will later today, and I am thinking that since the rings are created via selection then you could feather the selection by 1 pixel or maybe 2 to round off the jaggies in the initial step and then each succeeding ring would just be an expansion of the roundness so no further feathering would be necessary but optional on the other rings. I'll check it later today.

[Bohunk]

Bohunk -- I haven't tried this yet, but I will later today, and I am thinking that since the rings are created via selection then you could feather the selection by 1 pixel or maybe 2 to round off the jaggies in the initial step and then each succeeding ring would just be an expansion of the roundness so no further feathering would be necessary but optional on the other rings. I'll check it later today.

I have tried that and it does work...to a point. I guess it depends on the style map it is done on. The map I tried it with had too much of a jagged coastline and the rings closest to the coastline would actually smooth over and actually cross the coastline and islands of its coast. It is certainly worth a try and I hope you find something that works because it's a wonderfull effect.

[Ascension]

I think I've got a fix, what do you think? The "feather the selection" just produces a fat line due to blurring/feathering so I went even simpler and created a striped stroke of solid black with varying opacities (see screenshot).

JFJ -- Creating paths from selections then stroking that path is unreliable a lot of the time; it never seems to stay true, it rounds off way too much. Of course it could be something that I'm missing but the path never has the same detail as the selection (see screenshot). So I try to avoid paths.

[jfrazierjr]

Have you thought about doing a test with a woodcut effect instead of the rings? It might be a nice option for this style of map also.

[Ascension]

That's one of those myriad options that are out there for people to experiment with. I've never tried the effect and I wouldn't want to appear to be hogging all of the cool tutorial ideas

[jfrazierjr]

That's one of those myriad options that are out there for people to experiment with. I've never tried the effect and I wouldn't want to appear to be hogging all of the cool tutorial ideas

Hog! Hog! you can always post up a link to the other tutorial and offer it as a separate "or you could do this instead" type supplement.