Thanks, Ilanthar!
Thanks so so so much for the suggestions, Tenia and Jerron! Those are really helpful.
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Dystopia v4(sm).jpg
Now with locations. I'm interested in people's thoughts on the outer glow around much of the text. I don't love it, but without the outer glow it's harder to see the text on land.
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Dystopia v6 (sm).jpg
Wow, that's a basket full of dystopias!
Since you included Escape from LA, you might also want to include Escape from New York.
The outer glow is helpful, but I'm not a fan of the hard outer edge.
I don't know what the Photoshop options are, but in GIMP I like to duplicate the outer glow and give a blur, maybe 2-3 times the width of the outer glow. That softens the outer edge and I find that makes it more readable.
Thank you all so much for the feedback! I've been knocked out with a really bad case of the flu (but fortunately not the superflu, aka Captain Trips) and today is my first day feeling remotely human again so I decided to do a bit of work on the map. And I added Bird Box, since I watched it on Netflix while in a zombie-like state on my couch. Will it make more sense if I watch it again when I'm healthy?
That sounds like a great idea but I'm not sure how to go about it in Photoshop. Hmmmm. In the meantime, I've followed the suggestions about using a dark outer glow and I think that really does make a difference. I'm not sure why my targets are acting like they're translucent and will try to figure that out later.Originally Posted by bkh1914
I did add Escape from New York, per bkh1914's comment. I don't think I can add more dystopias to the US portion of the map, because it's pretty packed. But if there are more dystopias that aren't set in the UK or any of its former colonies, I'd love to add them!
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Dystopia v8 (sm).jpg
Glad you are getting back to normal. Having the flu sucks.
This looks a lot better, especially for the labels that extend into the ocean.
The problem I always have with a black outer glow is that it makes the letters appear darker with small font sizes. Making the font color brighter sometimes helps...
The old-fashioned way (non-layer effect way) would be to hide everything except the layers with the outer glow and create a new layer from visible (I don't remember what that's called in Photoshop). Then change the color of that layer to be the outer glow color (remove the font color). Two ways to do that: a) lock the alpha channel, fill with the outer glow color, unlock the alpha channel; or b) alpha to selection, fill with outer glow color, deselect all. Then gaussian blur that layer 2-3 times the width of the outer glow and move it to the bottom of the label layer stack.
Since this is a manual operation, you have to redo it every time you make a change to your text.
Coming along nicely, I like that hand-made bevel effect.
I'm not entirely sold on the outer glow either. At least on the screen I'm seeing this on, it gets a little messy in my eyes and it becomes a bit hard to read. The larger text on the ocean look great. This is just a thought, I don't know if it will actually work in this case, but have you tried going the opposite direction and having the glow be darker than the text, not lighter? I find that a black glow sometimes helps a lot more than a white one.
Last edited by Kellerica; 01-15-2019 at 07:46 AM.
@aeshnidae
This is such a cool idea, it is real fun to see where everything played off.
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~The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of His hands.
Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they reveal knowledge.
~ Psalm 19
A map AND a compendium, nice
This is looking great!
Have to agree the glow on the text makes it a tad easier to read over land, but much harder (for me anyway) to read anything over the sea. As per Kell's suggestion, have you tried a black glow over the land labels (not sure how you would deal with coastal labels where the label is partly over land and partly over sea...
Hey Jen,
Love what you've done with the place. Only problem is there are no Michael Moorcock, Eternal Champion references. Londra, Gran Bretan and Europe from The History of the Runestaff and London from the Jerry Cornelius novels...
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