Photoshop Help for AH Map? Superfly or Nate?

[Vermillion]

Ok I did the last of the "touchup" work on my Central Mediterranean terrain last night.

The last thing I need to do is cleanup and finish the clipboard map.

What I need to do is overlay the grid.bmp (the gridlines and sector designation) on my map in Photoshop.

Now the grid.bmp is the one that Superfly (or was it Natedog) sent us during the closed beta. Its got a white background (but not a uniform white), and sector lines/numbers in black. Plus I went in and added the sector numbers to the rest of the map (originally it only had sector numbers for the center 256x256 portion, talk about a tedious process puttin in the number designations by hand for something like 400 sectors).

Now I use Photoshop fairly regularly (not an expert though) and I have my map setp as layers, and imported the grid.bmp in as a new layer.

How do I get the white background to transparent? Or effectively appear transparent?

The only way I can even begin to think to do it is to use the magic wand, go in and select the white in each gridsquare individually and delete it. But even then the white in between the black of the numbers will still be there.

There's got to be a better way (or at least more efficent).

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Vermillion
**MOL**, Men of Leisure
"Real Men fly Radials, Nancy Boys fly Spitfires"

[Gh0stFT]

hi Verm,

- klick on that Layer you wanna make Transparent,
- use the Eyedropper tool
- then goto Select/Color Range, it opens a new menue
- then click on the white with the Eyedropper.
  Adjust the white "range" with the Fuzziness controller. klick OK.
- Your White should now all be selected, press delete, and your done.

happy working  
Gh0stFT

[Rascal]

Or if that doesn't work, do the opposite - use the Select/Color Range and use the eye dropper to select the grid color (the grid color may be more consistent), then select Select/Inverse which will select everything except the grid, then delete it.

[Nash]

What GhostFt said will work. I don't like to use that feature much as it sometimes wrecks the edges of the selected areas. And a way easier way to do it is this:

Put the layer with the grid on top.

On the layers pallet, u'll see a small pulldown menu. For the layer with the grid, set it to multiply. The white will dissapear.

Problem is, it aint a uniform white, so the greyish areas will also superipmose on the map also. Try making the grid layer a true black and white by using brightness/contrast. If this deteriorates the lines, you'll need to manually erase those areas that you don't want showing up on the map.

[Jigster]

 

Originally posted by Vermillion:
Ok I did the last of the "touchup" work on my Central Mediterranean terrain last night.

The last thing I need to do is cleanup and finish the clipboard map.

What I need to do is overlay the grid.bmp (the gridlines and sector designation) on my map in Photoshop.

Now the grid.bmp is the one that Superfly (or was it Natedog) sent us during the closed beta. Its got a white background (but not a uniform white), and sector lines/numbers in black. Plus I went in and added the sector numbers to the rest of the map (originally it only had sector numbers for the center 256x256 portion, talk about a tedious process puttin in the number designations by hand for something like 400 sectors).

Now I use Photoshop fairly regularly (not an expert though) and I have my map setp as layers, and imported the grid.bmp in as a new layer.

How do I get the white background to transparent? Or effectively appear transparent?

The only way I can even begin to think to do it is to use the magic wand, go in and select the white in each gridsquare individually and delete it. But even then the white in between the black of the numbers will still be there.

There's got to be a better way (or at least more efficent).

So it is possible to edit terraint textures already?  

and if so, more then the 6 we already have?

I'm gonna start work on a water transition tile...ala land, to beach, to water and then connect it to the water tiles asap  

Btw to anyone who doesn't know already, Jasc has a 60 day free trail of all the PSP versions on their server (says 30 but it goes for 60) at jasc.com I believe.

I've basically lived in PSP for the last two years...and to think I used to use MSP  

- Jig

- Jig

[Superfly]

The Select Color Range feature is the best.  There is a slider for fuzziness that should be set to 0 if you're selecting the black of the lines.  I suggest selecting the lines because the paper white color is probably not a solid color.
Jig, he's not talking about the terrain textures.  And, you should forget about doing a transition from water to land because we'll be implementing that technique in 1.05.

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John "SUPERFLY" Guytan - Art Director
HiTech Creations
"Touch my tooter, smoocher!" - Ween
-=HELLFIRE=- SQUAD

[Kieren]

I've used Paint Shop Pro(5.0-6.0) and Photoshop (4.0-5.5) and Photoshop blows PSP away. I still have both, but my PSP receives relatively little attention. One thing PSP does very well is read the AH screenshots.  

[HaHa]

Actually I prefer PSP over Photoshop. The layer functionality seems much better imho

[Nash]

Superfly,

I just checked Verm's grid on the other post, and there's no antialiasing happening with the airfield lettering - so yer suggestion is indeed the best. But damn, the clipboard lettering looks pretty bad when composed of 100% solid, and I sometimes have a heck of a time reading the airfield numbers.

Just go look at Verm's map with that beautiful terrain... covered over with this....stuff. If ya don't know what I'm talking about, check it out at  http://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/Smileys/default/Forum1/HTML/004738.html  and try and name one base on the north shore of Africa. And the map is zoomed in a fair ways.

Is it possible to for us to create clipboard maps for the terrains we make with a bit more refined letters and symbols? Or is this 100% solid lettering done for resolution or zooming in/out reasons?

[Vermillion]

Nash, the Field Icons and Names are inserted by the FE, not by the creater of the terrain.

That would have to be something changed in the game itself.

The bitmap I am discussing is the background upon which the FE created items are overlayed.

In this case the shaded relief map of the terrain and the blue of the water.

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Vermillion
**MOL**, Men of Leisure
"Real Men fly Radials, Nancy Boys fly Spitfires"

[Nash]

Ah, .... duh... gotcha Verm. I didn't realize that. But thinking through it, I guess they'd *have* to be generated by the FE, in order to change colors when a field gets captured.

The best thing they could do then,  from a legibility standpoint, would be to at least change the font from a serif to a san serif one. I don't know why ya'd choose to go with the serifed when yer using so few (and antialised) pixels to draw the text. All the text we read on the internet for example, is sans serif for just that reason.

The grid coordinates otoh are much more legible. Check out how big the difference is, even though the field numbers are about twice the size of the coordinates:

 http://www.hitechcreations.com/cgi-bin/frames.pl?page=clipboard

But.... there's probably a good reason for the way it is. Just a small gripe anyway.

[Superfly]

I actually did all the numbering on the bitmap of the terrain map, and the FE just does the country symbol.  I think that is something HT did for that specific map.  Also, I would suggest adding some color to that map.  The field names would probably come out a lot clearer that way.

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John "SUPERFLY" Guytan - Art Director
HiTech Creations
"Touch my tooter, smoocher!" - Ween
-=HELLFIRE=- SQUAD