In my attempt to create an accurate description my my geography, I was stuck on how to find the area of my nation and found no clear way to find it. I know some of you share in my struggle, so let me help you out and share with you the method I used to get the area in km[sup]2[/sup]. I used the guide: http://nswiki.org/index.php?title=List_of_TEP_countries_and_dependencies_by_area and eye-balled the map to make sure everything looked and seemed right. I hope you enjoy and please let me know if something isn’t working or I got everything wrong because I probably have. Thank you!
Step 1:
Save a picture of your nation on the map to your computer. Then go to a photo editing program like .paint (Like I used) or anything else that allows you to crop and paint. You will want to open up the picture you saved and crop it so that a majority of your picture is your country.
Step 2:
After you crop your picture, remove all color from the picture except for the color on your nation. It is very important to have your country a uniform color and everything else a different color. I would suggest doing black to start then using a paint bucket to change it to white. If you choose to find TOTAL area, then color in lakes and rivers in your nation the same color as the land. If you wish to only find the LAND area, color the lakes and rivers the same color as the background. After all is colored in, save the picture as a PNG.
Step 3:
Go to http://www.coolphptools.com/color_extract#demo and upload the picture you just saved. This tool calculates the percentage of color in your picture. For best results, set “Number of Colors” to 2 and put the “Delta” on 1. This simplifies the colors for the program and makes it so that very slight changes in color are not counted differently as much. Hit “Run” and write down the larger number. Change that number to a percent by multiplying the decimal by 100 or moving the decimal to the right 2 places.
Step 4:
Subtract that percent from 100 to get the other color’s percentage (Note: This is unnecessary if your larger number was shown with the color of your nation). Go back to your image and find the dimensions and write them down. Make sure that they are in pixels. Mine, for example, was 374 px x 384 px. After finding the picture dimensions, find the area of it in pixels. Area is simply width x height AKA 1st number times 2nd number. Congrats, you are almost there!
Step 5:
Go to the website http://www.onlineconversion.com/percentcalc.htm to be able to find the area of pixels in your pictures. Put in the percentage of your country on top and then put in the area of your total picture in the space under it. Hit calculate. That should give you the area of your country in pixels.
Step 6:
After comparing the sizes listed on the NSWiki page linked at the start, the TEP map, and info from this thread http://forum.theeastpacific.com/topic/5228373/1/#new, I concluded that every pixel is about 4 km[sup]2[/sup] (Note: I have not tested this on any other nations, but I have looked at nations that are similar in size to me and compared them). Multiply your final area by 4 to get your area of your country. If you want miles, multiply your final area in pixels by 2.485.[edit_reason]Removed Step 7[/edit_reason]
