image editing stuff

[O Senhor Leetz]

I figured it would be easier to just turn this into a thread. So thus far, I've used a mix of scanned hand-drawn and Paint.NET to make all my maps and images so far. Paint.NET is great for almost everything, except fancy text. I'm looking to have the text on my maps follow things like coastlines, mountain ranges, and the general shape of the land instead of having it all sit in blocks with no flow to it. if anyone knows how to do what I'm looking to do on GIMP or any other free program?

[Nomadic]

It can be done on photoshop so chances are pretty high GIMP can do it too. I'm unfamiliar with GIMP however. You might want to hop over to the cartographer's guild and ask. They have several professional GIMPers.

[Superfluous Crow]

Hey, hadn't heard about paint.net before so thought I'd pick it up. How do you do coastlines in it?

[O Senhor Leetz]

all the line work on my maps was handmade and scanned.

[Superfluous Crow]

Won't there be a lot of artefacts from the scanning process and erased lines? How do you e.g. get color to stay within the lines?

EDIT: I have now spent half my evening (okay, not half, but some of it) looking for an answer to this question, and I can't really find anything. How do you turn your scans into any kind of functionable outline?

[brainface]

Won't there be a lot of artefacts from the scanning process and erased lines?

Gimp (and apparently also photoshop) allow you to clean up linework using the levels or curves command. You can basically make dim background stuff go away and foreground stuff show up better. You basically have a little graph with sliders that you adjust until you get the contrast how you want it.

It's a very generic command, it works on scanned drawings, fuzzy copies, out of contrast photos, etc. Is that the kind of thing you're talking about?

If you're asking about gimp, i can show you how to do it exactly. In another program you're on your own. ^_^

[Ghostman]

Here's a short and simple tutorial with screenshots on bending text to paths in GIMP. If you find it difficult to color-fill the selection, make sure that you're editing the correct raster layer.

(Note that GIMP treats text as layers too. If you still have the original text box as the active layer, the color fill would try to operate on that instead.)

[Nomadic]

Won't there be a lot of artefacts from the scanning process and erased lines?

If you've ever watched a youtube speed draw video you'll notice that most professionals actually scan in their pictures and simply trace the lines with a hard brush. Takes much longer but gives a higher quality end product.

[Superfluous Crow]

Hmm, but that pretty much requires a tablet or a digital drawing pad, which I don't own... My scanner allows me to fix the picture up pretty well with the aforementioned color/contrast slides, but if i try to color it in there will be a multitude of near-invisible holes that allows the color to seep out of the outline! I have some methods from my image analysis class that might be applicable ("closing" and "skeletonizing"), but it's kind of overkill to program them into matlab to fix a single outline if I can get GIMP to do it for me.

[O Senhor Leetz]

I just inked all my lines and adjusted the scanner setting. in the program, I may have also selected all the lines, then selected inverse, deleted the inverse, and fill w/ whatever color i wanted.