The Continent of Bulbremeth

[Ilanthar]

I completely agree with Diamond : it's a beautiful and very original piece and you definitely should post maps more often! A bit more contrast would have made it even better though.
I love your work on the shields and the concepts behind the names and nations (lot of fun and cool ideas there). The texture and all your work on the frame, compass and lines is just awesome.

[arsheesh]

I'm with everyone else in that 1. this map rocks, and 2. there could be a little more contrast between land and see. Also, the smaller labels appear to me to be almost illegible, partly due to their size, and partly again because of a lack of contrast. Still, kudos man, this is a beautiful piece. More of this please.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Pixie]

I'm not a big fan of this style of land (the textured ruggedness) and the populated/labeled spots seem too equally spread out for realism. BUT, apart these personal dislikes of mine, I find this map a great piece of catography and a pleasure to look at.

The overall feel is great (I am with you about the absence of blue hue on the sea) and the composition is spot on and original. I would have loved to see a WIP thread for this one..

Congrats on your piece and have some rep!

[snodsy]

That border and compass rose spectacular!, love the grid markings, that's a project in itself, nice job, have some reps.

[Abu Lafia]

Hey Daelin, awesome map! Can only agree that it would be great to see a wip-thread of yours in the (near) future. Have some well-deserved rep!

[Daelin]

As I am want to do, I have taken your poignant yet well-intentioned critism to heart, and thus I present a slight reforging of the map. I've tweaked the "sea vs. land" contrast a bit, to where there should be a more noticeable difference, and where I am happy with calling it sufficient. Also, I just couldn't let stand the oversight of the splatter in the transparent area outside the parchment, so I done fixed that as well. The new version is attached on the bottom.

There is something else I've been wondering, though: when I edit my maps in Photoshop, and when I save them as jpgs and then view them Irfanview (my default software for simply viewing images), the color seems to have been somehow skewed during the conversion process into the jpg-format. I've searched the interwebs and found that I have to use the 'Save to Web' function in Photoshop, instead of just 'Save as...'. I think is has something to do with embedded color schemes, or something along those lines? I just wanted to know, you guys also see a definite difference in color between these two versions, number 1 and 2, right? And the new version of the whole map, I just posted, what is color scheme in that closest to the one on left or the right, 1 or 2?
color_view.jpg
I can't really figure out what is causing the weird altering of colors when I save my maps, because I'm not an expert on this stuff.

[Chick]

I see a definite color difference ... #2 is much redder than #1. The full image matches #1.

[xpian]

Great map! I love the icons and texture.

As for the color differences, I know some stuff about this, having dealt with color space conversions and gamuts over the years in printing and graphic design. It's a complicated field, unfortunately, because different programs and different operating systems can be a little unreliable about how they deal with color management (although it's getting better as the years go by). Basically, you want to always save your images with a color profile attached to them (embedded inside as part of the file) and try to keep a reasonably color-calibrated monitor profile to do your work on. Some browsers (perhaps most of them at this point) will be able to automatically detect your embedded color profile and adjust the appearance of your image for your viewing public as needed on whatever device they're viewing it on. Safari was always good at this, and Internet Explorer used to be bad, but I think most modern browsers do it just fine. So the problem, as you've already guessed, is likely that, depending on the way you save your file you're sometimes not embedding the color profile from Photoshop into the file, or you're saving with a different color profile depending on the method.

If you want to set up a truly color-managed workflow, where you've profiled your monitor and profiled your printer(s) and have all the profiles loaded into your OS and Photoshop, you can totally do that and it's an appropriate thing to do if you're producing high-end art prints or giclee posters. I'd guess you're not doing that, however.

Probably what you want is to reliably produce the most broadly-compatible JPEG files of your artwork to be distributed, viewed, and perhaps printed by your fans and/or clients. So, you should:
1) Calibrate your monitor if you can, and set your system to use that calibration.
2) Set Photoshop's internal color calibrations to use sRGB.
3) Make sure that when saving from Photoshop, you have checked the box to embed the sRGB profile in your JPEG file.
4) You can do SAVE AS, but I always recommend doing SAVE FOR WEB instead because you have so much more control and power from that dialog box.
5) See if having everything set to sRGB this way is giving you reliable color results.

Adobe RGB is a broader gamut, and would theoretically give you slightly richer colors, but sRGB is the old Windows standard that's been around forever and has become the "lowest common denominator". As with most things when considering web compatibility, it's the lowest common standard that you usually want to go with.

[Daelin]

3) Make sure that when saving from Photoshop, you have checked the box to embed the sRGB profile in your JPEG file.

Yeah, that's what I arrived at too, after looking it up on the web. I guess I'll just do that from now on since that produces the results I want for the jpg. I'll have to look into it again if I ever want to get some of my maps printed professionally.

[- Max -]

It's alright now Daelin, you can edit this thread, I've deleted the second one