Area map for D&D

[craggles]

Awesomeness! Thanks - You are the bomb-diggity

You may want to hold the praise until you see it first.

[ritalee76]

Video has been watched and you ARE officially the bomb-diggity

Thank you so much for making the dang clipping masks make sense (finally)! I've been photoshopping for years and never understood it fully till now.

Plus, you've got the best accent

[ravells]

Fantastic video Craggles, I've never even heard of clipping layers (only been using ps for 5 years) or thought of using smart objects in this way. Have lots of rep!!

[craggles]

Fantastic video Craggles, Have lots of rep!!

Thanks ravells - oooh 18 rep points, nice. Did this have anything to do with mentioning your coastline tutes?
On the subject of tutorials, I have enjoyed yours a lot especially the city design info, I definitely needed all that info. For our current campaign, I'm needing to add several cities so I can now make them actually work correctly instead of randomly throwing buildings here and there and hoping for the best.

On your blog site, however, a lot of your finished maps were using Photo Bucket for storage and it appears you've moved or deleted several of them so we can only see the Photo Bucket warning thumbnails.

Thank you so much for making the dang clipping masks make sense (finally)! I've been photoshopping for years and never understood it fully till now.

I've never even heard of clipping layers (only been using ps for 5 years) or thought of using smart objects in this way.

Excellent! That's one of the reasons I thought I'd do a vid tute as it makes it a lot easier to understand if it's shown, than trying to follow some of my inane long winded written ramblings.

You may have noticed from the Graphic Basics site that it's intended to be a full Photoshop (as well as Illustrator and InDesign at a later date) Training course for the beginner, moving onto the intermediate then and all the way to advanced but I had to stop thanks to health. I'd already written a dozen or so chapters but didn't want to officially start until I'd be able to fire them out at a consistent rate.

But, (and this is the point to the info in my previous paragraph) to see the level of information given in Photoshop tutes that were out there already, I watched quite a large number of them and one of the things they all seemed to miss out are clipping layers. It's also not the sort of thing that's not easily apparent if it's activated as well as a difficult thing to activate in the first place unless you know it's there already. It was one of the great things added back in Photoshop 4 I believe or it may have been in Photoshop 3 when layers themselves were first introduced. Over the years, it seemed to have been forgotten thanks to the introduction of layer masks, styles, groups etc so I'm very pleased to have reintroduced/clarified clipping layers!

...and saying that, thanks to being unscripted, I've just realised that I missed out the advanced blending options for a layers entirely (which are in addition to the layer blending modes of 'multiply', 'screen', etc) but I'm not sure how they'd be of use for mapping; but then again, I wouldn't have thought using rendered clouds would be a useful thing to do for mapping coastlines either.

hmm - I'm feeling the urge to record some of the episodes I've already scripted now! But I'd not worry too much at watching them just yet because they're all starting with the VERY basics (hence the name) for people who've only just picked up Photoshop for the first time. The intro to layers that I have scripted, for instance, doesn't even mention layer styles, masks, groups etc - it's THAT basic!

There's several episodes all about how RGB and CMYK work, what resolution is all about, going through the tools etc so it'll be a very long time getting anywhere near to something useful for your levels!

...ah, speaking of inane long winded ramblings, I think I'll stop it there.

Plus, you've got the best accent

Thank you - I'm very glad I didn't speed the vid up now for Smurf vocals!

[ravells]

Don't think I ever did any coastline tutes (I generally draw them by hand with the pencil tool)....the two best ones (IMO) are RobA's and Ascensions. I'm glad you found the city tutorial helpful. It struck me that we were all getting highly developed on style but many of us (including me which is why I started to write the tut in the first place) really didn't know an awful lot about the fundamentals of city design.

Sorry about the blog site - I recatogorised the photos in photobucket so all the links are broken. All the maps there are posted here though.

I'm self taught on PS and have scoured the web for tutorials, but never have I found one on clipping layers. I use smart objects for photograph editing but never saw a use for them in mapping...until now that is. Thanks for opening my eyes!

I have to say that your clipping layers / smart object technique is the most useful tool for non-destructive mapping I've seen for many years and it really deserves more visibility. You should cross post a link to your video tutorial on the tutorial section (which is the most visited part of the site). Do that, and I'll give you a tutorial award so that more people look and learn from it.

best Ravs.

[craggles]

You should cross post a link to your video tutorial on the tutorial section (which is the most visited part of the site). Do that, and I'll give you a tutorial award so that more people look and learn from it.

Thanks Ravs

I've added it there.

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...2219#post72219

[Steel General]

hmmm...yet one more thing I'll need to check out.

[Diamond]

Rita: the colors on your map(s) are gorgeous. Very rich and textured. Me likes!