excellent website, and good tutorial.

Dpi & ppi are the problem. What Commercial printer refers to DPI? I think You must be refering to LPI "lines per Inch". Laser printers, imagesetters, printing press, thermal wax printers, ect., all use halftones to simulate shades of grey! Ink jet printers use dpi because they dont use halftones and instead use groupings of the same sized dot to simulate shades of grey. Commercial printers don't use dpi or only refer to it because it's old equipment. Besides if you dont understand dpi, lpi & ppi, your going to have a big problem. Try resizing you image to 1500 dpi as Boxx saids and you had better have one hell of a computer cause the file size will be ridiculous. The only type of art that uses A high level of Dpi is in the scanning process and only when your scanning in Line-ART. How do I know all of this you ask, because it took me almost 2 yrs of self studying and passing Adobe's Expert level Certification test. But please, don't take my word for it, if you look it up in your photoshop manual it will tell you the same thing. Further more, high end magazines and high quality brochures use a LPI of 150, wich means your image/project should be using a base of 300 PPI. If your image was going to be used on a 1200 dpi laser printer, your image would need to be set to 400 PPI.

First of all whats with everyone calling it DPI!!!!!!!!!!! Dots Per Inch!!!! This is only used with ink jet printers and old scanners!!! Why u ask, because Dpi is measured 1/300th of a pixel!!!What we are discussing is PPI. Pixels per inch. Pixels per inch refers to how we see an image on a monitor. So what this means is: DPI & PPI are like a sock and hat. They both fit on a human but, you dont wear a sock on your head unless your an azz, (catch my meaning I hope). Sorry for being so blunt about this but, I see it all the time written in these colums in regaurds to the mass confusion of DPI & PPI. Now to the topic at hand, yes you screwed up, however #1, genuine fractals will certainly do the job,( may need tweaking of - course ), however you probably dont have that. #2, You can try resizing it to 300 "ppi" with the resample turned on. Convert the image to Lab mode and select the channels tab and then select the lightness channel. Run the unsharp mask filter with a radius of no more than 1.2. You can adjust the "amount" and "threshold" till it looks good. Remember this, the sharpining will look better when printed, then seen on screen. So dont be shy with the "amount" setting, but dont over do it either. This is a short cut, and may not work depending your project. For future Reference you shoud always ask your client what formats and printing are they looking to do. I highly recommend conntacting their printer to see what CMYK work space they use as well as, what LPI their using. Most professionally printed poducts use LPI rather than "DPI" because DPI only refers to ink jets printers, which in turn means "shitty azz cheap printing".

post a picture of an example of "day for night" and I'll find a way to do it.

do the maps in photoshop. give you a hint: use curves. its an awesome tool and can make anything look like crome.

xenofex, or to do it home made by making a new layer, use the clouds filter, then diff clouds for more texture, (use black and white for the colors, you can colorize it later). invert the layer, and then use blendings options:default (photoshop 6) or layer options (photoshop 5). move the left side (black) traingle under this layer to the right about half way. hit alt/option +click to seperate the traingles. ajust it to your liking and erase what you dont want then colorize to your liking. this is one of the best tricks out there and its very effective, even better than xenofex if you adjust it right.

filter: polar coordniates. its going to distort some. use illustrator or accually freehand will do the best job.

try www.wacom.com. by the way you may want to invest in a tablet. you can try running some filters in photoshop and use the history brush. you could also use find edges filter, then desaturate the image, adjust the black trianle towards the right to reduce the grey's in the image. you can then paint in the colors with the brush tool set to multiply, ( do the painting on a seperate layer ) you can select different parts from the black and white outline and use the paint bucket tool as well. as a final step you can but the image in illustrator and the brush tool again to do the black out line strokes. sorry to tell ya to get the results above your going to have to use freehand, especially for the hair.