Hi everybody,
I'm seeking advice about the best software to choose according to my needs. I'm not seeking to produce final-product artistic maps but reference maps in order to stabilize my creative process, to firmly fix the geography, which is hard for me when I use only hand drawn maps, and be able then to make easily other maps on that basis (the countries at different ages of history, the migration of populations, things of that kind). I guess one way to do it would be to scan hand-drawn maps, use them as a reference and use Photoshop. But Photoshop is not really made to easily calculate distances for a map, I guess, and my wish to be able to work at different scales seems maybe a bit too grand with Photoshop.
It seems to me that the softwares like Inkarnate or Wondercraft are more made for a final map (that would be useful for the readers of my projects, later), but I don't think that they are adequately accurate and precise for what I want. Moreover, I love stylized maps but at this stage it is not really what would help me (I rather think about the detailed map for Gondor and Mordor for The Return of the King, for example).