Map quality in Adventure Path

[Sixela02]

Hi,

As a player, I played Rise of the Runelords via the FG module back in the day and the maps were super high quality.

Today, I want to play Rise of the Runelords as a GM but without the FG module (I have the PDF) but I can't attain such a high map quality with my PDF (Interactive map for Rise of the Runelords), this get blurry really fast and it's not that "good" for virtual tabletop play.

So I was wondering, how did FG made the map in the "official module" have a "better quality" than the originals one in the official PDF ? That would be helpful, I may have miss something with my PDF :D

[Phixation]

May I ask how you imported the map?

[Trenloe]

So I was wondering, how did FG made the map in the "official module" have a "better quality" than the originals one in the official PDF ?
The developers get the original map files (usually PSD, sometimes TIFF) from Paizo.

[Sixela02]

I tried extracting images from the PDF or to take a screenshot.

Oh, nice to know. Sadly that the kind of content we'll never get as player. Thanks anyway ! I may consider buying the module in this case.

[Phixation]

if you have the free adobe acrobat.... try using the screenshot option and just highlighting the map. then cropping the image in paint or GIMP so no extra border space... save as a jpg..... my maps never turned out blurry that way

[Morquendel]

You should be able to open the pdf with gimp on the page of the image. this way you will get more dpi (=better image quality)
usually do this with affinity illustrator... trying with gimp now. works fine. this way you should get the same quality as from psd...

[Trenloe]

Paizo don't include a high DPI image in their PDFs. Images are sampled down when they create the PDFs in Adobe InDesign - otherwise the PDFs would be very large and wouldn't work well on tablets, etc..

You can tell GIMP to load in PDFs at a forced DPI level, but if the image quality/data wasn't there in the first place you won't get a better quality image as GIMP will have to upscale to the DPI level being forced. This might be a marginal improvement on zooming in a lower resolution image, or you may want to do some post processing (sharpen can help, etc.) to slightly improve the view.

Reminder: if you're using FG Classic keep your images within 2048x2048 pixels (or as near as you can) whenever possible.