Rivermill

[Leviathan62089]

@coyotemax

After all my years with P-shop... I never had a clue about that little feature! I'll be utilizing that one in the future quite a bit. Thanks for the info, unfortunately it's too late for poor Rivermill, but if I decide to go back to an earlier save then I'll probably utilize it.

[Hai-Etlik]

White highlights make the map look "glossy", the lighting would look more "diffuse" if you made the background colours lighter or darker rather than just adding white. The forests have a similar problem, it makes them look like they were made by dripping green wax on the map.

Also it's really dark overall, which makes for poor contrast and poor readability.

I'd recommend trying to think about two things while map making:

What information am I trying to convey and how can I convey that as effectively as possible?

How would the in character cartographer I'm mimicking have done this, and how can I best replicate that?

[RobA]

oooh flatten is the bane of my existence

according to your profile you're using photoshop - so i have a suggestion (that Ascension pointed out to me)

Instead of using Flatten, create a new layer on top of everything, then do Sht-Ctrl-Alt-E - that creates a flattened composite on the layer you just made, but doesn't flatten the file itself. Then you can run your effects on that, if they require a fully composited image...

And for the Gimp users - I'll point out the equivalent is Layer → New From Visible.

-Rob A>