[Award Winner] Making Map Borders in GIMP

[Ascension]

I prefer little squares in my corners so we're all different. Read through it all and I didn't see anything missing. Nice tut, man, very explanatory...I like to know why I'm doing things instead of just following along and hoping it turns out.

PS - if you find this tut good give it a rating and maybe we'll be able to give out a new tut award (been a long time since we've done that).

[arsheesh]

Unfortunately I'm not really familiar with Photoshop, otherwise I'd have written a PS compatible version of the tut. But like Ravs said, I'm sure a conversion wouldn't be too difficult (on the contrary, you could probably do quite a bit more with this in Photoshop). In fact, I just looked at 290Blue's latest WIP and it looks like he figured out how to convert the tutorial over to PS.

As for mismatched vs matching checkered neat-lines, I was offering that advice as more of an aesthetic preference than a recommendation based upon historically sound cartographic practice (e.g. for a historic counterexample check out this 1780 map of Italy). So calling the mismatched borders style a "mistake" was perhaps not quite fair, or accurate. If you like that style, go with it. Also, thanks again everyone for your feedback on this tutorial.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[290blue]

Thanks for the excellent tute arsheesh, it's very thorough and easy to follow.

It's mostly a simple conversion to photoshop; most of the commands are the same or very similar. The only tricky bit is that PS won't let you shrink a selection if your selection is the whole image for some reason (not sure if this is me or a quirk of PS). I had to expand the canvas bit by bit, first to the top of the neat lines, then to the bottom of the frame, then to the final canvas size, making paths along the way, in order to get it all in the right place.

[RobA]

Nice tutorial!

I caught one typo "weal" instead of "wheel".

Interesting way of making the grid/checkerboard. Here is how I do it...

I look at the image size (i.e. 1800x1240) and decide how many checks/divisions I want. In this example, I'd pick 18 and 12. To get the corners all black, these need to be odd, so 19 and 13. I create a new layer that size and render the checkerboard pattern like use suggest but 1x1. I then scale this layer to the size I need it making sure interpolation is none. This will enlarge the layer to the size needed and avoid fuzzy lines.

-Rob A>

[arsheesh]

Well that makes sense, hadn't thought of doing it that way. Thanks for letting me know about the typo. I've caught a few of them since reading it through again, so I'll probably correct these at some point and upload the edited tut.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[jfrazierjr]

Very cool stuff. If you(being the tutorial reader) make maps of several "standard" sizes, it would probably be useful to save different renderings of the frame(s) in your most common sizeed maps for quick and easy use. Just make the map, and plop down the pre created border on top. Of course, this assumes the border creator also select's the interior and replaces it with transparency prior to saving.

[arsheesh]

Not a bad suggestion. Having a set of frame templates would certainly be a time saver. On the other hand though, you might also want to experiment with new designs of your own.

cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Katto]

Very good tutorial and also a nice layout btw. Repped and rated!

[arsheesh]

Thanks Katto! Regarding the layout, I borrowed some ideas from Tear's wonderful Saderan tutorial.

[arsheesh]

I've just finished editing the original tutorial; hopefully I caught all the minor mistakes. Thanks Rob and Jax for pointing these out.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh