VascoElbrecht's video: Extracting stream data from google maps with illustrator and photoshop CC

As a freshwater scientist, you often need to make a map showing your sampling sites or stream quality, if you want to publish your research. While you can use GIS software for this, accurate and detailed shape files are not always available. However, Google maps often has quite detailed stream data. Wouldn't it be great if we could use it in our maps? In this tutorial, I show you how to generate a publication ready map using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator CC. After taking a screenshot, we use the Image adjustment option in Photoshop to convert the image to black and white, only retaining the actual streams. This line art can be then automatically converted into vector files, which can be further modified, e g by increasing thickness of the lines. Finally, we use layers, grouping, clipping mask and edits to the vector lines to produce a nice looking map. I hope you find this video helpful. Follow me on twitter for more videos! https://twitter.com/VascoElbrecht