User blog:Steve820/How-to guide for making tracks and the season summary map

During the time I've been here, I've had some users ask me how do I make my tracks. There has also been a few users recently (namely Hypercane and Andrew444) who has been asking me how to make a season summary map. Well, let's get to it.

Tracks
The first thing you need to do is download this picture onto your computer. And then, you open it up in Paint (that's the software I use to make my tracks). Once it has opened up in Paint, you select the "Brushes" tool (between the shapes and tools sections), change "color 1" to white, and click the size icon (with the 4 lines, progressing downward from thinnest to thickest) and change it to the thinnest one. You're now ready to start your track. Pick wherever you want to start your track, and move your cursor along until you reached your ending point. Once you're done, pick the triangle icon in the shapes section, select the "Fill" dropdown and click "Solid color", and change both Color 1 and Color 2 to match exactly the colors in my track. The blue triangle indicates when the storm was an invest, extratropical system, or other non-tropical cyclone systems. A blue triangle is a depression strength non-tropical/invest system, light blue is a tropical storm-strength non-tropical/invest system, etc. (see below for more stronger colors you can use for the non-tropical stage). After a couple of those, change the triangle to a circle by clicking on the circle button in the shapes section, but the color remains blue, which would indicate depression strength. Later, as you go further into your track (unless the storm formed stronger, you can start with one of these), you can change the color of the circle to "Light-blue" (tropical storm strength), "light yellow" (C1 strength), "yellow-orange" (C2 strength), "orange" (C3 strength), "dark orange" (C4 strength), and "red" (C5 strength) as your storm strengthens. Once your storm reaches peak intensity, start using weaker colors afterwards, and once you're at the end of your track, you should be back at the blue triangle. There are also squares you can use to indicate subtropical systems, again with the same colors. Make sure your circles, triangles, and squares are small, about as small as those in my tracks. Once you have finished your track, crop the image to a smaller size, save it, and now you're all done! Once you're done, you can upload it to this wiki if you want (but that requires an account).

Season summary picture
Download the same picture used in the section above, but immediately crop it to your desired basin using tools such as Paint or GIMP. However, this time you need to use GIMP to successfully get the tracks into the proper place without any large squares covering the basin (this is what Paint does when I attempt to copy and paste a free-form selection onto the basin). For a better explanation, see this picture:

GIMP doesn't do that. It pastes the track onto the map without any artifacts. On GIMP, the first, and easiest part is to free-form the storm tracks furthest apart from each other and paste it on the map, by clicking the third icon on the toolbox at your left (it is in the top row with an icon resembling a rope) and surrounding the track with the selection until you've reached the starting point again. To paste it on the map, simply have the basin picture open along with the track you are copying from. You right-click the free-form selection you did, select "Copy", and right click onto the basin map, and select "Paste". Then move the track to where it happened in the basin; a good indicator to check if it is in the right position is to see if there is any abnormalities in the land (if so, move the track again to put it in the exact place). For fishspinner storms, it would be good to briefly leave the storm track, find an island or nearby land, use the free-form selection to cut through the island/land, and come back to the storm track. Then move the track so the pixels are in the right place as they were; it would be good to have the track with the free-form selection to compare to see if the track is in the very right place on the other map (the pixels on both pictures match, etc). Now, the harder part is to paste storm tracks that overlap with other storms on the map; this happens after you have done all the storms furthest apart from each other first. To do this without leaving any significant mess on the basin map, you need to be much more careful in doing the free-form selection of the storm. It is required to follow the exact edges of the selection instead of just surrounding it to prevent the mess. That means, to try not to move the selection into any blue ocean areas, and try to be as careful to stay on the edge as possible. If it is a fishspinner storm, you can go off the track and find a land mass and come back, but make the area between the track and land as thin as possible. Once you are done and have done it very neatly, it should look a little something like this:

I hope all this helped! If you have any questions, you can leave a comment below.