OT: maps

Out of curiosity, do any of the conworlders here have experience with map
creation? Specifically, how to correct distortion on a projection map?

I have a lovely relief/climate map pair that I created using a "planet
generator" program, but they're Cartesian projections (with parallel straight
longitudes) so the upper northern and southern latitudes are all stretched and
distorted. I have a "view in globe" utility that gives me an idea of what
things are supposed to look like, but no matter how nice the source image is,
the "view in globe" utility has very limited resolution so the images are all
grainy and pixellated, so I can't just take a screenshot and use it as the
basis for my continent/country map.

There's got to be something out there that will let me change straight longitudes to
more realistic curved ones -- a better way to wrap an image to a sphere and
take screenshots of zoomed in areas, or even better, a way to do that AND a way
to create those funny looking sinusoidal projections. (I think that's what
they're called anyway. The ones that pinch the longitudes together at the poles
in sections, you know what I mean?)

I figured since a number of the conlangers here are also conworlders, it
couldn't hurt to see if anyone had experience with this and had any pointers
for me.

Heather

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