[Award Winner] Antique-style maps in Photoshop

[Ascension]

21. Now you might be thinking to yourself, “There’s something missing” and I’ll say “Yes, there is…but do you think you can handle it?” It’s time for the latitude and longitude lines and it can get a little tricky. The first thing we are going to do is draw out a 2-pixel black line from the very top to the very bottom (on a new layer). Next we need some guides placed 200 pixels apart (our image is 2000 pixels wide so every 200 pixels is 10% of the map). Zoom in to 1600% and put the guides in at 200, 400, 600, 800, 1000, 1200, 1400, 1600, and 1800. Use the Move tool and place the black line directly in the middle of the first guide. Copy this layer and move it to the next guide. Keep going until you get all of the guides covered with a black line. Merge these layers together. Copy this layer. Edit > Transform > Rotate 90CW. Merge down. Rename this layer to “lat long”. We now have our lat and long lines. For that extra “coolness” factor we’re going to distort these lines. Click on the “Background” layer. Image > Canvas Size = put 1000 in each of the windows (this will add 500 pixels to the top, bottom, left, and right of the whole image). Click back on the “lat long” layer. Filter > Distort > Spherize = 50%. Now that looks pretty cool. Click on the “Background” layer. Ctrl-click on the “aging” layer. Image > Crop. Now our image is back where it started (2000 X 2000) but we need to erase any lat long lines that go through the frame. Next, put in the numbers to indicate the degrees of latitude and longitude (use Times New Roman in italic and a small font size). When that is done, do the blur and apply the layer style from step 11 ((pic antique 19)). NOTE: this process works perfect if your continent is on the equator; if your continent is above or below the equator then you will have to add more lines and then move them around after the Spherize is done and possibly Edit > Transform > Scale.

[Ascension]

22. This is now done. Now you can start adding your own things to the edges. I went back and added an outer glow of black to the “land” layer as well as an inner glow of black. I did the same for the mountain line (not the little hatch lines, the original fat line layer) but with a smaller size glow radius. You can use the empty space for doing inset maps of islands or cites or add clipart or whatever. Just make sure that anything you add is genre appropriate (no spaceships). When the map is all done, add your favorite torn edges/burnt edges/ripped edges border and add in some distress, folds, scratches, grunge and whatever else.

Happy mapping to all and to all a good map.

[Korash]

I was thinking of this type of style for my hand drawn map but was worried about the mountains. The way you did them (ridge line and fuzzy worm) is something that I might be able to pull off by hand. I have no prob. (at least not now that I have tried a few tut here) adding the color on the comp, but I wanted the line work for the terrain to be done by hand.

thanks muchly and duly repped and rated.

:edit: might even have rated it twice

[Ascension]

You'll notice the hair on my worm is rather scram-gravy since I did it with a mouse but I think that's what gives it its charm, dont'cha think? That part could be done much neater in Illustrator or Inkscape and since that's sort of like speaking Sanskrit to me I chose not to do them that way. Thanks for the rate and the rep, glad I could help

[Sigurd]

Thanks for the Tutorial.


Appreciate the cohesive thought and hard work.


Sigurd

[Bohunk]

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.

Great tutorial and great looking map; the comp would allow me to rep ya again!

[Hoel]

So cool. Will definitely try this at home. I've been trying alot of different styles of mountains, but this one looks better than anything i've come up with.

[Steel General]

Excellent as always my friend, I will give this a whirl in the next few days.

PS - I have compiled this into a MS-Word (2003) file and attached it for those who want to download it.

[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.