The Gimp version worked like a charm! I tried this one first as I had already prepared the guide lines, since I figured I'd need those anyways for manually cutting the picture.

One remark on for future readers: If you use Image->Slice along guides you get all the images in separate tabs, which is good if you want to work on them further, but tedious for saving. However I found out there's a second way of doing it: Filters->Web->Slice opens a menu with a few simple options, most notably image format and a path to save them to. With this method you don't get the tabs, but the pictures are saved at the specified location.

I have other tilesets to prepare as well, so I will use the other methods for those.

Another combat encounter for my TTRPG campaign. In this one our Ranger will finally be able to utilize her beloved bow (in my woodland battle maps there is always so much stuff in the way, "it's not even funny anymore!!!" :D)

now I have to figure out, how to make fitting stairways. I was thinking about using colour key to cut into the natural stone slabs and then use some kind of black magic that I think @Loopysue once mentioned.

I think there is an effect one can use to create the illusion of a staircase by "just" make some shadow play on an entity.

At the moment I tried to make such an effect by hand, but it's not where I'd like it to be yet:

doing it by hand is a drag, but that's not the biggest issue with this approach: the stairs should get darker gradually when going down a level and I have no idea how to do this. I'd need a transparency effect with some kind of edge fade, but only in one direction...

I tried to search in the forum for "stairs" but that was not specific enough and I don't know how the effect is called that can be utilized to create such stairs.

If anyone could point me to a post/article/live mapping session where such effects are used/described that would be much appreciated!

Yes exactly: the river in the symbol has a (rather thick) black outline. My Idea was to try and match this outline as close as possible on your other rivers, so it would look like the river from the symbol is part of your own river. at least on first glance, I don't think one would ever get an exact match with this...

I think Monsen is on to something. I increased the line width to something non 0 and it get's better. It's still not wysiwyg so I'll play around a bit more with line width and the effect strength.

Thanks for the hint!

Sounds about right

Yes, that what I was talking about, Sue:

i turned of the blur effects on the left one, so you can better see why that is not working for me:

the left one is I was going for originally, the right one is what I get if i do two wall shadows, one as wall, one as drop.

the two wall shadows have a strange interaction that the dropshadow does not have. But even if that was not the case (or if I ditch the wall shadow as you so kindly pointed out): I still cant get a proper treetop shadow. For that to work automatically I have to put multiple dropshadows next to each other and set a rather high blur, so they smear into each other and the underlying hack disappears.

I had one other "genious" idea: what if I just draw a big magenta circle over the treetrunk put that on a shadow sheet, make it a wall shadow as drop and then apply color key. Most of you will probaly instantly see that this does not work either. I did not see it, I had to experience it. The effect one gets is something like this:

or nothing at all if the color key is applied first.

I don't grasp a lot of effects yet, especially those that use some kind of a filter like the edge stripes and the displace effect, so maybe those are capable of adding an automatic treestop shadow that follows the sun, but the only way I see at the moment is to live with the fact that we can't change the sun afterwards and just hardcode a bunch of dropshadows.

Or just eyeball it and place the shadows manually on their own shadow sheet.

If we had a scale option in the wall shadow dialog, we could use your treetrunk symbols. I think those come in two parts. so we could make the roots on one layer (with a wall shadow if we wanted to have evening/morning feeling) then put the second part on a second layer, again with wallshadow but this time as drop shadow and scaled up. that way the two shadow effects wouldn't have this strange interaction, the second part would get blown up before the glow effect get's a hold of it and that way we could get sun following treeshadows semi automatically...