NewbieDM Tutorial – Printing Battle Maps to a 1″ Scale
So you’ve made yourself some kick ass tokens, but now you want to make yourself some kick ass maps to use them with. Well, you’ve come to the right place!
Taking a map from the Wizard’s gallery, and converting it to a 1″ playable map isn’t very difficult, and it looks better than some Dry-Erase markers a on a grid… although this may not be the best thing for every encounter… maybe just for the big fight at the end of the night or something… Take a look…
Nice, right? That’s not going to be the map I’ll use in the examples, but it doesn’t matter. If you want to do it along with the tutorial, the map I’ll be using comes from the Wizards gallery for Dungeon Magazine Issue 160.
Now, like the counters and tokens tutorial, I asume you are working with Photoshop for your resizing. You can use GIMP instead of Photoshop, but I do not know how to use it.
Let’s go then. you can click on the pictures to make them bigger.
1. Find, download, and open your map in Photoshop.
2. With the Rectangular Marquee Tool, making sure you make it a fixed aspect ratio, and outline along the lines of one of the squares on the grid. Then go to Window–>Info and make the “info” box appear.
3. You see the W and the H on the lower right of the “info” box? That’s the width and height of that square you selected with the Marquee Tool. It should be a decimal, because if it were a whole number, it would be that in inches. So let’s say it is .431 for width and height. That’s how big that square is. .43 of an inch wide. Almost half an inch. But we want to make that square a full inch.
4. Open your calculator in windows. You are going to divide 1 by the decimal. So in my case it will be 1 divided by .431
5. The answer is 2.32 so that’s what I’m going to use to resize the map. Go to Image–>Image Size. See the width and height there in pixels? I multiply the width listed there by 2.32, and that’s my new number. 1306. Enter that into the Width box. Make sure you selected the option to maintain proportions, and it’ll enter the height automatically. You could enter either one really, it doesn’t matter.
6. The map is resized. Go back to the marquee tool and select a square. Look at the info box. The height and the width should be about an inch. Maybe less, like .998 or more, like 1.01. It doesn’t really matter at that point. Now just save it as a jpg and that’s it!
You can print your scaled map in Microsoft Excel. Start a new book, and import a picture from file. When you import it, you can print it out, and Excel will automatically tile it accross multiple pages.
You can also download a program called Posterazor and play around with that, it makes posters out of your images. It’ll print at scale over multiple pages as well.
That’s it, pretty simple really. Just match up your papers and tape them. Use cardstock for best results, and use it at the table with your tokens or minis.
That’s it! Try it and let me know how it goes!
Dude…DUDE! I`ll totally be adapting this for importing maps in to gametable. -Thank you-
Does 1″ scale matter in gametable??
I understand that you have Photoshop, but do you know how to do this in other programs. For instance, Ifranview is a freeware program that also allows for resizing. Do you know if it’s possible for that program or do you know of any other freeware programs that will allow you to perform the measurements?
Also, in your example above, it appears that the “squares” in the drawing were not perfect squares (0.431 x 0.417). You used the larger number to get the ratio for the resize (e.g., 1/0.431 = 2.32). If you took the smaller dimension for the resize, the magnification would be greater (e.g., 1/0.417 = 2.4) or the average being 2.36. Ideally, you would rezize by the two different dimensions to get the “ideal” 1″ scale.
Zelgar:
You are right, it is not a perfect square, because I didn’t use the marquee tool correctly to select a perfect square. It was obviously a little large on a side. I think I would have to hold down shift or something like that to make it a perfect square. There is a way to do it. I went the fast way, to get it done quickly. Again, I think holding down shift while you drag the marquee tool creates a perfect square.
I honestly am not sure about other software. The concept is the same, measure the current square dimensions, and resize it based on the numbers.
You can hold down shift or you can change the Mode of the Marquee tool to “Fixed Ratio” and put in equal numbers like 10×10. That will force it to be square but allow you to vary the size.
[...] looking maps based on scans of Dungeon Tile sets … very nice. Newbie goes on to give a tutorial about printing Battle Maps to a inch scale too … cheers! Possibly related posts: [...]
[...] para você imprimir os mapas que vem nas revistas de RPG (eletrônicas ou de papel) em escala para suas miniaturas, pelo Newbie [...]
Mais links de domingo | Rolando 20 - D&D 4ª edição said this on January 25, 2009 at 9:15 am
Dude, this tutorial is WAY easier than what I was doing before – using the free transform tool and eyeballing it with some guides set at 1″ intervals. You freaking rule. Now my issue is simply finding maps with a resolution that’s good enough that they don’t look crappy blown up so large.
Grog, I’m gonna print out your comment and show my wife.
The next time she argues with me I’m gonna tell her “who ya talking too? I fu***ng rule woman!!!”
Thanks for the nice compliment and good luck with your gaming!
by the way i tried some things out with GIMP and it’s pretty simple to use the same idea. Use the Measure function (ctrl+shift+M..?) to measure a line. If you get a result like 0.21 inches just scale up the map +/- 500% and BAM you got a full scale battle map. It seems to run smoother using GIMP on my 2004 AMD el cheapo laptop than with Photoshop on my 2006 dual processor big money Mac G5. Go figure.
Tried this and it worked great, I never thought of this method to work it – way easier than what I’d been thinking I’d have to do.
If you want to save on ink then desaturate the picture a little, and otherwise play around with the contrast till you’re happy. This can be done to make a greyscale map usable (sometimes colour to greyscale gets confusing – a lot of the time this can be fixed by playing with the levels)
And it can make a colour map use much less ink while still being usable, and looking quite nice. Now if you’re getting them printed somewhere else and they’re charging by the page, no difference to you, is it? This is more useful if you’re doing it at home.
In Photoshop, hue/saturation is command-U and levels is command-L (that’s in mac – probably ctrl-U and ctrl-L respectively in windows). Both, and other ways of messing with the overall picture, are under Image>Adjustments.
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[Adventure] The Sibylline Idol (Judge covaithe) - Page 25 - EN World D&D / RPG News said this on June 15, 2009 at 1:38 am
If you do not have Photoshop then you can use this method to stretch your maps to 1″ squares and print them using Excel.
Ok, i have a question regarding this. I have a picture that is W:2428 / L:2095, somehow am having problem doing the adjustment.
I made a square that is 0.158 by 0.158, i have divided 1/.158 = 6.32, and then i took the W: 2428 and multiply it by 6.32. The problem is that the picture is getting huge.
Huge how? In Megabyte size, or in actual inches?
Remember, each square is an inch, so a 20 square across map is 20 inches!
What exactly are you talking about?
What you can do is cut it up into sections and work on sections at a time that you paste later after being printed out.
Ok well what am gonna do is give you a link to download the map i want to scale and you can try it. I have scanned it at 600dpi so it could be better looking at higher resolution.
Just that you know that i was able to scale other picture but i was unsucessful when i use scanned picture.
http://tic.cegep-chicoutimi.qc.ca/pkennedy/download/600dpifull.rar
Ok, well, you’re working on a 28 MB png file, not the most efficient file format. I’d try converting to a jpg or gif and then resizing it. That should reduce the file size
[...] need to somehow transfer some of these maps from their pages to our tables. Yeah, I know I have a tutorial here with a technique for scaling up and printing maps, but that’s not feasible for all. A lot of people depend on a battle mat and dry erase [...]
Brand spanking new DM here with absolutely no experience with the game. My wife, a couple of friends and I decided to dive into the D & D world. Mostly for the game and social aspect of it.
I’ve been going over then net, trying to find some starting advice and I keep coming back to your page. I live in a part of the world where there are literally no hobby stores for hundreds and hundreds of miles. The DIY gig is about the best we can do without paying an arm and a leg for shipping. A lot of your posts and links are just what we need to get started and not use lego men for markers
I just finished this tutorial with GIMP and it was easy as can be. I used the above comments suggestion of using the measuring tool and your calculator step. No problems.
Looking forward to more of your posts. Now I’m just waiting for the books to come in the mail…