Zombie Nirvana Games

Show Notes

• I’m endlessly fascinated by the many different ways Photoshop uses the 8-bit grayscale value system to manipulate images. When you start digging around and really looking at how it accomplishes certain tasks, you start to realize just how much of Photoshop’s magic relies on it. Displace and Emboss are really  just the tip of the iceberg!
• Wow, I used a lot of keyboard shortcuts in this one! Within a minute or two, I think I used at least 8. They’re real time savers, though. This page has a collection of shortcuts from Photoshop 5 all the way up to CS3; I really need to print out a copy of the CS3 version and keep it next to my laptop for awhile.

Fantasy Cartography with Adobe Photoshop, the podcast where I share my favorite tips, tricks, and techniques to help you make cool maps for your roleplaying games, reaches double digits with this landmark 10th episode!

In this extra-crunchy episode you’ll learn more than you ever wanted to know about Photoshop’s elusive Displace filter!

You can check it out at Revver, YouTube, or at the iTunes Music Store. Don’t forget to stop by ZombieNirvana.com for this week’s show notes!

Until next week, thanks for listening, and happy mapping!

Show Notes

• Not my best episode, I think. I was flustered a bit because I’d spent some time adding in the extra buildings and text, then lost all that work in a crash before I had a chance to save it. You’d think I’d know better by now. If I had only two words of advice to give for Photoshop, they’d be “Save often.” You’ll save yourself a lot of heartache.
• Depending on what font you pick and what sort of look you’re going for, you might want to use the Text Warping tool to make it more interesting looking. You can access it by clicking on the “T with a curved line under it” button on the Options bar while you have the Text tool selected. Something to keep in mind with the Text Warping tool: the styles look worse the further down the list you go. Try the Arc style limited to just +/-5 the next time you’re making a map; it adds a bit of nice visual interest to your text. Check out the Veiled Islands or the Western Lands for some examples.
• Why doesn’t Photoshop have an Autosave feature? I suspect it’s because that, particularly with big files, it takes a bit longer for PS to save a file than, say, MS Word, because it has to prepare the file before saving it. Still, it’d be nice if it were an option.
• Before I started watching Bert Monroy on The Screen Savers, I always pronounced Wacom “way-com”. But Bert pronounces it “whack ‘em”, and he’s actually met the folks at Wacom, so I just assumed he knows what he’s talking about. Plus, “whack ‘em” is just more fun to say.
• When I mentioned I reset the click on my Wacom stylus, I meant specifically the front-click on the button, the one that’s normally a right-click.
• Speaking of Wacom, they’ve got a pretty decent selection of Photoshop tips on their website. It’s definitely worth checking out. And if you don’t have a Wacom yet, they’re really worth every penny. I’m using the same Graphire I bought back in 2000, and it still works like a charm.

The ninth episode of Fantasy Cartography with Adobe Photoshop, the podcast where I share my favorite mapmaking tips, tricks, and techniques, is now available! In this episode, we’ll add some text and make a few finishing touches as we head into the home stretch on our first map.

You can view this and all the other episodes at Revver, YouTube, or at the iTunes Music Store! And don’t forget to stop by ZombieNirvana.com to check out this week’s show notes, my weekly Photoshop tips, and for more information about my upcoming Fantasy Cartography with Adobe Photoshop book.

Until next week, thanks for listening and happy mapping!

Show Notes:

• Sorry I missed last week’s Photoshop tip. I was feeling a bit under the weather; I’ll try to do something special for this week’s tip!
• When you’re swapping back and forth between the Pen and Line tools, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by saving your Line tool settings as a preset. When you’ve got the Line tool set up just the way you like it, just go to the Tool Presets palette and click on the ‘Create new tool preset’ button. (Which looks just like the ‘Create new layer’ button in the Layers palette.) If you’re really feeling industrious, create different presets for different things: Large House (40 pixel weight, white color), Medium House (30 pixels, white), Small House (20 pixels, white), Gable (15 pixels, white), Wide Alley (25 pixels, black), Narrow Alley (15 pixels, black), etc.
• You could also use a Vector Mask instead of a Layer Mask when you’re using this technique. (I had a Photoshop tip on vector masks a few weeks ago; you can find it here.) On one hand, this gives you a big advantage: you can edit your shapes over and over and over again, because they remain there on the mask, and you don’t have to keep using the “fill path with foreground color” button on the Paths palette. But if you want to run a filter like Cutout, you’ll have to rasterize the Vector Mask into a regular Layer Mask anyway. For a more modern map, where you want to keep those sharp vector shapes, a Vector Mask is perfect, but for a map like the one we’re making here, a Layer Mask makes more sense.