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June 1, 2017 By Cartagram 2 Comments

Key to Adobe Lightroom

suit case image

Photo by Erwan Hesry

While most mapmakers are comfortable with Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop software, some choose to use Lightroom for processing photographs as a hobby or another income stream.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (or Lightroom or Lr for short) accompanies Photoshop in Adobe’s Creative Cloud Photography plan. If you have Photoshop CC, you also have Lightroom CC.

To sell photographs at stock photo or print websites, keywords you add to each image’s metadata help attract, and ultimately sell, your work. Time invested in filling in metadata fields like title and caption, and the fields in Keywording and Keyword List panels may save time when uploading to sites that sell your work.

But not all sites will maintain your keywording investment in Lightroom. Some don’t recognize Lightroom’s image metadata. Some do read the metadata and automatically fill in their own fields with Lightroom’s metadata. With these sites, you create save time by thinking and adding keywords once in Lightroom and deploying them to several sales sites.

I have an article on which sites make use of your Lightroom metadata. View it here.

Filed Under: Graphics, Photography, Tutorial Tagged With: Adobe, keywords, Lightroom, metadata

January 6, 2014 By Cartagram Leave a Comment

Graphic Graph Paper

With its vector and raster tools, Adobe Illustrator is the graphic designer’s Swiss Army knife.

Recently, I created an image showcasing some of my logos for my homepage slideshow. Because the slide was sitting on a white page, I wanted to give it some color to make it stand out from the surrounding page. While a solid, pastel background would have worked, I wanted something a little more dynamic and a lot more organic. To convey the idea of designing logos, I thought about a sheet of graph paper as a background to the logos.

blog_graph_0
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Graphics Tagged With: illustrator

July 16, 2013 By Cartagram Leave a Comment

A Touch of Type

Illustrator CC’s June 2013 edition brings several enhancements to the software that can make your maps more creative. The new Touch Type tool lets you turn a plain map title into a stylistically unique image.

The Touch Type tool lets you edit the size, position, and angle of individual letters in a word while keeping the type editable. An update to the The Adobe Illustrator CS6 WOW! Book includes a detailed a step-by-step tutorial about using the Touch Type tool. But while you’re here, here’s a quick teaser.

custom map title using Illustrator CC's Touch Type tool
[Read more…]

Filed Under: Graphics Tagged With: custom maps, illustrator, type

April 25, 2013 By Cartagram Leave a Comment

The Well-Dressed Map Marker

Everyone knows the iconic Google map marker. Looking like a hot air balloon in flight, this marker has landed squarely in the middle of our visual culture.

Many maps use similar-looking markers. While you can find lots of alternative marker shapes and designs online, why not be a little different and let Adobe Illustrator transform your markers into eye-popping icons? Placing your icons under the creative control of the Appearance panel gives you a myriad of visually sophisticated options.

custom map marker illustration
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Filed Under: Graphics, Maps Tagged With: custom maps, marker

February 25, 2013 By Cartagram Leave a Comment

Antiquing Type on a Custom Map

If you want a hand-rendered or antique look for a custom map title, you can search for one of the many fonts available with a distressed appearance. Or, you can distress regular fonts using Adobe Illustrator’s Appearance panel, Effects, and Opacity Mask. It’s fun and the experiments you create might move your creation in an unexpected—but delightful—direction.

Mapmaker Steve Gordon applied the Roughen and Scribble effects, and the Opacity Mask, to chip away at the edges of letters for this title graphic.

antiquing type
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Filed Under: Graphics, Tutorial

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We're professional cartographers and graphic artists. We've been making custom maps, graphics, and web images since 1997. Wow...that's a long time!

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