General Photoshop stuff

[Goldfish4209 9]

Generally, how do you use photoshop? I have version 7.0 and also, how do you make maps with it?

[RiverCocytus 0]

Hey, so here's a little guide, describing the way I use it (at least.)

When you create your map, do File -> New from the menu. remember the old formula (64x64px = a small area, etc, +1 to each dimension.) Set the color mode to grayscale, and leave all of the other options alone.

Depending on what height mod you use (if any) you will probably want to set the foreground color to that color, and fill the image with it. While in grayscale mode, Photoshop will not stop you from choosing nongray colors, but they will still appear as gray.

Key tools I use:

Pencil - (same place on the menu as the paintbrush) use it to make paint-like edges to your shapes. Its best for doing bodies of water. Change the brush type/size for different effects. Be careful with the jagged shapes, while they look cool in photoshop, they might not look like anything in the actual rendered terrain.

Paintbrush - (same place as pencil on menu) softer edges, really. You can use the soft-edge brush at really huge radii to make round, smooth hills.

Select+fill/gradient (gradient and bucket fill are the same menu item... click and hold to switch.) Adjust the 'tolerance' factor and set it to 'contiguous' if you want it to fill areas of similar color. Turn this off to make it paint over the surface. Use the marquee tools, rect/circle, lasso, or magic wand (which selects areas of similar color) to select the area to fill.

Smudge Tool (in place with blend/sharpen tools) use this to shape the paint to look more like what you want. Smudge is basically irreversible - aside from undo-ing. (Ctrl-alt-z steps backwards) When making craggy hills/rocks/mountains, it is invaluable.

You could mess around with the other tools too, like for instance, dodge and burn may be used to raise/lower your terrain in a particular area while still maintaining the relative heights.

Grid To activate it, do view -> show -> grid.
view -> snap to -> grid will determine if it will snap to grid. Now, go and set the grid to a more useful size
Edit -> Preferences -> Grids, Guides & Slices will take you there, set grid size to 256 and units to pixels (px) with 4 subdivisions. (or whatever you wish, this just creates small grids the size of small areas and major gridlines the size of large areas.)

Saving: When you like what you've got, go to File -> Save and save it as a jpeg, with fairly high compression (like 8 - 10) The reason for this is, quite simply, the jpeg format may compress your image too highly at low quality and mess up your landscape. (Even your plains may end up a wrinkled mess.)

Side Note: Adobe takes a lot of ram... a LOT of RAM so if you have only 256 mb or less be extremely mindful! You might want to lower certain settings in adobe to help you out... do this by going to
Edit -> Preferences. General contains the ability to reduce the number of history states (saves some ram.) also you can lower the power of the image interpolation... this is used (I think) when the image is being displayed at a zoom lower than 100% (like 33%.)
Most importantly, there's Memory and Image Cache. If you find adobe uses too much memory anyway, just lower the percent it is allowed to use here.

Other useful stuff: While using most paint/fill tools, holding alt will turn the brush into the Eyedropper. (this is the color grabbing tool) Keep your hands near Ctrl-Alt-Z at all times; this steps you backwards (undoes multiple times) and also Ctrl-Alt-R if you want to go back forward.

Does this help you out? I can be more specific, but I think it would probably just be insulting to your intellect

Well, if you have any other questions just ask.

[killerbyte 0]

i posted a tutorial on how to make a whole reigon here:

https://www.simtropolis.com/idealbb/view.asp?topicID=73584 it is the 6th post

 

You must know how to use the basic functions of photoshop