[6S.Maraz]

I tried with Gimp to select the colour of RGB 35 and used a large soft edge brush to paint an area...but it left a real mix-up of stuff with only a bit of woods at the edges...should it be normal or addition of the colour and is it best to spray it on like an airbrush?

You cannot use soft edges or airbrush when painting map_T, because it is just not a "paint" but a color-coded map.

So only sharp-edge tools (pencil etc). The game engine will "soften" a bit the edge of the forest

Forest is just a range of pixel values (24 to 27) not an addition of colour.

Maraz