Seeking advice about what software to use

[Mattias Jansson]

Hello, new to this forum!

I registered here to learn how to make maps. I will freely admit to being a novice when it comes to computer graphics, but I’m usually a fairly quick learner. With maps in general I am anything but a novice however, have been drawing maps with pens and paper since my childhood (I even built my own large transparent drawing board as a teenager), but I slowly have come to realize that I will need to go digital in order to keep up with the times.

History is among my greatest interests, and I often have reason to try and make maps depicting a specific place during different eras. I also happen to be a huge rail fan, and one project that I have become loosely involved in is trying to create a historical rail atlas of sorts. This would be in the form of a series of maps showing the evolving rail network of a specific country in ten year intervals (the general idea is to have one map of 1870, 1880, 1890, 1900 etc.).

This means we (I’m not alone in this) will have to produce maps that mainly consist of lines, whereas they won’t require super detailed landscape relief. Basically only coast lines, lakes, navigable rivers and canals are necessary as far as landscape features are concerned. The basic background can be white or possibly light yellowish, maybe with some depiction of mountainous terrain and some other very basic features (but nothing like built up areas since they vary too much over time and it would be too complex to recreate the exact urban sprawl for different decades). Other than that the rail lines will be the focus in the form of solid, dashed or pointed lines in a range of different colours (to separate type, gauge, ownership, relative importance etc.). While this may not require extremely high resolution, we do intend to make maps that are of good enough quality that we may eventually be able to print them.

For this purpose (as well as a few other similar projects) I’m looking for suitable map making software. As I said I’m a pretty quick learner, but I won’t have the ability to spend all my time on learning the most challenging and sophisticated programs. (Although free software is always nice I’m willing to pay up to perhaps around 800-1000USD for a good program.)

I have already noticed there are some tutorials on here that seem interesting enough, but so far I'm not exactly sure of what might be the most useful tools for me. So if you guys know of a both easy-to-use and powerful map making computer program, I’d be most grateful for any advice!

M J

[Kellerica]

Well, I am massively biased in this regard, but I can and most likely always will say that Photoshop is pretty much the best mapping tool one can hope for. The possibilities it offers are just limitless, and there are a ton of great tutorials on this forum on how to make maps with it. It's not the cheapest, but it will enable you to do whatever you want once you get the hang of it. I went in knowing nothing about it, and the tutorials here have taught me to both use it effectively and to find new and cool ways of making things.

Of course it depends on what you want. GIMP is another software that a lot of our people use and can make awesome maps with it, and it's free.
Krita I believe is a free drawing/art program that a lot our mapping people have gotten into using and I've heard good things about.
Affinity Photo is another photoediting software that is said to be a serious contender to Photoshop, but it's amazingly cheap compared to it so it might be worth checking out. And then there is of course the mapping software Campaign Cartographer that a lot of people use as well.
All of them can produce good things, but it all depends on what kind of look you are going for.

You might also want to consider using a vector based program rather than a raster one, if you want to keep things relatively simple looking. The upside of vector graphics is that they scale infinitely, so you don't have to worry about the resolution of your maps. Of such programs, Adobe has Illlustrator, then there is the Affinity Designer that is very cheap and I personally like a lot, and I believe Inkspace is a completely free alternative to these.

In the end, I'd say it depends on the level of your need to control everything I prefer PS because it allows me to create everything from scratch. It takes more time than importing ready assets made by someone else, but I can lay out every. single. line. the be just the way I want it and not one pixel less.

[Phergus]

This means we (I’m not alone in this) will have to produce maps that mainly consist of lines, whereas they won’t require super detailed landscape relief. Basically only coast lines, lakes, navigable rivers and canals are necessary as far as landscape features are concerned. The basic background can be white or possibly light yellowish, maybe with some depiction of mountainous terrain and some other very basic features (but nothing like built up areas since they vary too much over time and it would be too complex to recreate the exact urban sprawl for different decades). Other than that the rail lines will be the focus in the form of solid, dashed or pointed lines in a range of different colours (to separate type, gauge, ownership, relative importance etc.). While this may not require extremely high resolution, we do intend to make maps that are of good enough quality that we may eventually be able to print them.

To me, this suggests that you should look at vector graphics programs like Adobe Illustrator for a more illustrative than painted look.