Working with images

As mentioned earlier in my Contests post last month, I'm taking part in the Shadow Magic 1-vs-1 Tournament this year. Since I am a moderator for the PBEM forums over there, I've also been doing some organization work for the tourney. One of my areas of responsibility has been designing the scorecards for the different rounds.
The first round was easy enough to do as I just applied a watermark to a scroll picture and copied the text from Excel. For the subsequent rounds, I spent some time trying to create something that was different from what we've used so far and in that process, learned a lot more about layers and effects and how to manipulate them. The end result was something I was really pleased with -

Shadow Magic Tourney Bracket

Running high on the feeling of satisfaction from creating the above image, I decided to take a shot at doing one of the first maps for Blood and Lyrium. Creating a nicely textured map from scratch is a lot of hard work and requires far more time and expertise than I have so I decided to use the Thedas map as a base. At some point in the past, I found a link on the EA site to a really high resolution map of Thedas (6680 X 5010) and I used a small portion of that map to create mine.

Blood and Lyrium Map 1

I still had to do some work to remove all the existing text and if you notice, even at full resolution (you can click the image to get there), it is almost impossible to find out where the original text was and I am really pleased with that.
Next step is to start integrating this into the module and hopefully, people will be surprised when they actually encounter this map in-game. Why? Well, you'll have to see for yourself!

In this process, I accidentally solved the issue with the 24-pixel border on the maps but was not able to replicate it. The accidental solution was to have a black canvas around the image but doing that again didn't work on this map. Need to investigate that more!