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Hey all i was reading in techniques about OSI style map making and this is what it said:

With mod10/11 it is now possible to make a mountains that look like OSI's. My technique is to first draw out my rough mountain area. Generally with the lasso tool, then feathering/smoothing the selection a bit. After that fill with the lowest mountain color (5) as always. Then contract your selection by one pixel. Select the next mountain color (10)

now i dont have Adobe photoshop but i was wondering how i might do this same technique in Paintshop Pro. i tryed using the magic wand tool to lasso the mountain and went to feathering to make the image smaller so that i could dye the mountain with number 10 color but it wont let me die it..is there something im doing wrong?

I have been using Paint Shop Pro 7 exclusively for my map making needs, and thus far it has been more than sufficient.

Don't use feathering, it's generally useful for blurring edges of 24-bit color selections, and thus useless in a 8-bit image where pixel accuracy is tantamount.

Instead what you should do is the following:

- Make a selection of the terrain you want to change... e.g. on a field of grass, lasso the area you want to turn into mountains

- Choose the eyedropper tool, and right-click on the mountain color you want to set as the lowest altitude area. Hit the Delete key to set the selection to the color. Note that hitting Delete will set the selection (and only the selection) to the color in the right-most widget, e.g. the 'background' color.

- Click on Selections | Modify | Contract, and contract the selection by what amount you want. I generally use 3, since some tiles don't transition properly at 1 or 2. Mountains can be set to 1 since they're not as clearly defined as other terrain types.

- Never use feathering for anything you will do while editing your map. Instead, draw rough areas, then use a small (e.g. 3-7 pixel wide) paintbrush (rounded, not square) to smooth curves and remove single-pixel variations in terrain.

My "trick" for handling any sort of terrain is to work from the ocean inward.

- Select the terrain you want as the "outer edge" which is immediately adjacent to the ocean.

- Select desert-0 as background, then delete the entire map.

- Select a desert-2 as foreground color. Change the paintbrush to 255 width, 100 opacity, 30 density, square, and evenly speckle the entire selection around the edges. You could get specific, and try to merge saved selections, but this is the no-brainer method.

- Click Selections | Modify | Contract, choose a variable from 3-15, and click OK.

- Now select grass-0 background, hit Delete, select grass-2 as foreground, speckle everything with 255 paintbrush as above.

You can do this with any terrain type, but remember that grass must be used for transitions for most types of terrain (though there exist exceptions, such as mountain->dirt, desert->water, and others).

Hawkins Thank you! totally works! im on my way to a better map! hehe thx again!