Freshly printed Channel detailed topo map

[Bucic]

I don't think it's OK for me to edit the map and re-upload it myself but you can take this map

https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3310307/

open it in GIMP and use the Filters > Enhance > Unsharp (great name for a sharpening filter BTW)

and apply the following values for great results. I think the preset *03 works best. Just copy the values from the screenshots, since it's a custom preset saved by me.

Then you can go Image > Scale Image : 25%

Compare it with the *original*.jpg screenshot.

Edited September 29, 2023 by Bucic

[Bucic]

Out of curiosity I checked the GIMP help page for the Sharpen filter and it had an interesting section on color distortion. I re-applied the filter as the section advised - after decomposing the image color/value components. The results are pretty astonishing! Also the latest development build of GIMP crashes with OpenCL enabled so I got rid of that factor.

The results are amazing, with even more sharpness and without the previously present color distortion. Note that some image viewers may display such a sharp map poorly if they do not apply any resampling method.

I exported the image in GIMP using 75% image quality (indiscernable from noncopressed!) in two variants:

scaled down to 25%

scaled down to 50% (which is over 10 times the size of a 1080p screen)

With scaling down another batch of speckles and other inconsistencies in the image get eliminated.

 

Edited September 29, 2023 by Bucic

[Bucic]

Don't laugh, I've just discovered that F10 map has a topographic/raster option. So I tried a similar process. This time re-applying sharpening again after recomposing. If the effect is excessive to your liking you can tone down the second sharpening. The problem is the F10/editor raster map is handled by DCS as an archive containing tens of tif files. I don't have any experience in batch processing in GIMP and somehow I don't feel like diving into it.

The location of the in-game raster map is D:\Eagle Dynamics\DCS World OpenBeta\Mods\terrains\TheChannel\RasterCharts\RasterCharts.zip plus some description labels file in binary format. Additionally, each of the dds files there have embedded mipmaps. I don't know whether they are used or not.

The process I tried today was

 

Edited September 30, 2023 by Bucic