Practical stamping tool

[ilm]

Hi all! First post here .

I'm trying to make a map (primarily in Photoshop) and find myself a bit stumped when it comes to drawing mountains and trees. I've scavenged images from various posts on this forum but I can't seem to find the right way to apply them:
- if I just control-C/control-V, it takes forever since the image of the little tree is always pasted in the same place. It's more like copy, paste, move, paste, move, etc. Plus, I have about a billion trees to draw and it's going to take years.
- if I make it into a brush, light areas become transparent. That doesn't work for me because when you stack two images partially, the second one can be seen through the first. It's messy and simply unrealistic (if I have two mountains, slightly offset, one should just be on top of the other and partially hide it from view instead of having a crazy overlap of both).
- I've actually gone out and made the images into symbols in Illustrator to use the symbol sprayer tool. While this looks like it'll work well enough for trees, mountains are still an issue as a) there's no way to place them precisely, and b) every time you stamp another mountain, it moves all the others.

All I need is editing software that lets me take a small image, assign it to some quick and easy shortcut (left-click or whatever) to duplicate it quickly and precisely as many times as I want, without introducing any unwanted opacity or transformation or affecting other parts of the map. I never thought it'd be such a difficult function to find. Does anyone know which software would let me do that?

Cheers!

[- Max -]

You can actually easily use the stamping tool in PS. Create a white layer, create another layer with all your trees/mountains/whatever you want to clone, select stamp tool with a hard brush, Alt click on the object you want to clone, click it to place it on another layer. Do alt-click on objects layers and click on the other layer again and again. You're done

[ilm]

You can actually easily use the stamping tool in PS. Create a white layer, create another layer with all your trees/mountains/whatever you want to clone, select stamp tool with a hard brush, Alt click on the object you want to clone, click it to place it on another layer. Do alt-click on objects layers and click on the other layer again and again. You're done

Isn't that going to overlay the entire circle of the brush, including white/background color around the object?

Oh wait, unless you place objects are on a transparent layer? That would work, wouldn't it?

(big fan of your maps btw)

[- Max -]

Thanks Actually no, the best way is to create a group layer, put in the colored object layer and the white layer beneath. When you want to stamp an object, alt-click on the object layer, then duplicate it by clicking on another layer outside this group. You'll have only the colored object cloned.

[Chick]

In the Stamp Tool, there is a choice to use Current Layer Only or All Layers. Just select the Current Layer Only. My control for that is at the top of the screen when Stamp Tool is selected.

[ilm]

Hi! Just wanted to pop in to say thanks for the tips . Map is still very WIP but I think I've got the landscape mostly pinned down. Now all I need is cities and towns, roads, political borders, points of interest, names for everything, and decoration (map border, legend, etc.).

So, about a year's work

[Midgardsormr]

You might find this tutorial of interest:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=7336

[ilm]

Thanks! I ended up going with Illustrator for the mountains because it allowed me to vectorize them and scale them properly. Also, it's easier to sort out how they overlap since essentially each one is on its own layer, which you can move back and forth (something I could also do in PS but with more clicks).

The trees I made into a PS brush and worked well enough. I did however use the clone stamp for my desert symbols, but they didn't overlap anyway...