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Photoshop tutorial: make an old fantasy map of your area

Put your city on the map in 4 layers. Create an artistic old map of your area.

Here's what you should be achieving:

psd map tutorial step5

Step 1: Getting the actual map

Go to maps.yahoo.com, find your area and zoom in to a desired level -- I went in somewhere between City and Street view in some area in Bucharest, Romania but you can also do a Country view. If your part of the world isn't covered by yahoo maps, try google maps or get a regular image of a map for the area you need.

Hit the PrintScreen key, go in Photoshop and paste it in a new document and then Crop (C key) the image keeping only the desired part. Use the Patch Tool or the Healing Brush Tool to remove the center cross.

psd map tutorial

Step 2: Applying the old paper texture to give it a vintage look

For the second step you need an old grunge paper texture. I used this free image from cgtextures.

Paste it on a new layer above the map and set the blending mode to Multiply. If your image turns out to dark, select the paper layer and go to Image > Adjustment > Brightness/Contrast and set set the brightness to a higher value (I didn't need to). You may also need to adjust its size and position.

psd map tutorial step2

Step 3: Adding a photograph

Now you need to find a suited image of your city/region. Well, it doesn't necessarily have to be related to your region as long as it looks good. I used this image of the The Athenaeum in Bucharest. But I also found fantasy/surreal art images to look great here (examples at the end).

Paste the image under the paper layer and adjust its blending mode, opacity and brightness/contrast. I used Multiply with a 50% Opacity but you may want to try other values for your image of choice (like Soft Light for the blending mode or increasing the Brightness).

psd map tutorial step3

Step 4: Clear the roads!

Next thing I did here was to create a Layer Mask to the Bucharest Athenaeum layer and while having the mask selected and the foreground to black, I used a 100px brush with 0% hardness to brush away the sky.

Then, with the same brush, but after setting its Opacity to 50% I brushed some more on the mask in regions I considered to "crowded" like where there ware roads and texts from the map layer and trees and building parts from the Athenaeum image.

I then reduced the brush size and brushed some more along the roads.
The brush size should be smaller than the road width. Try to only brush inside the roads.

psd map tutorial step4

Step 5: A nice final touch, the borders

Your layers should now be in this order: Paper layer (up most), Photograph layer and Map layer.

While having the Photograph layer selected, create a new layer (Ctrl+Shift+N), name it Borders and fill it with white (press D and X to make the foreground color white and Alt + Backspace to fill it with color).

Hit Ctrl+A to select all, go to Select > Modify > Contract and contract the selection by 19px. Change the Foreground Color to #999999 and hit Alt+Backspace to fill the selection. Go to Select > Modify > Contract again and enter 1px. Hit the Delete key to clear the selection.

psd map tutorial step5

And you're done. Gongrats!

Oh, right... I promised the fantasy examples:

psd map tutorial fantasy image
I used two layers with two photographs for the one above, both with Multiply blending mode and both with layer masks.



psd map tutorial fantasy image


Another cool vintage example:
psd map tutorial fantasy image

 

And another one, of a south Romanian view (click to expand):

psd map tutorial fantasy image

Go beyond: add a page curl using Veerle's tutorial and place it on a desk environment! Use it all in your new layout for your website.

Let me know how it all went. Good luck!

 
Comments (10)
1
Wednesday, 09 April 2008 04:21
This is the epitome of "nifty"
Floated!!!
2
Wednesday, 09 April 2008 11:59
I love how you've actually used a real map from Yahoo for this! Good job.
3
Thursday, 10 April 2008 03:32
Very original. Congrats.
4
Saturday, 12 April 2008 04:09
Great effect, very original as well
5
Tuesday, 22 April 2008 20:36
I really like this tutorial and I'm looking forward to trying it later today. The end result is looks great. Thanks for the tut!
6 Stefan
Thursday, 24 April 2008 00:32
I'm happy to hear it was useful.
I also apologize for the names not showing up in the comments. I was working on something on the commenting system and must have messed something else up. Weird thing is although all the names are still in the data base, only the names of the persons who commented before the incident stopped appearing. For the comments that appear after, everything's fine.
Will fix.
7 Brissy18
Sunday, 18 May 2008 12:15
Hey. Thanks for the great tutorial. I shall use it. But don't forget to put a great old north point to top it off.
Cheers
8 Stefan
Monday, 19 May 2008 04:22
Brissy18, I can't beleive I didn't thought of that.
9 Rajita -Logo Design
Thursday, 29 May 2008 15:16
This is very interesting.I will use it to show my shop on website.
10 kayakax
Thursday, 26 June 2008 22:02
wow! super. tnx

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