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As promised, this is the ugliest map that I have ever been happy with ...
Attachment 44567
I watched a video on Masks in Photoshop, ripped a quick handful of images (water, sand, grass, trees) from the web and started practicing to see if I could get it to work. Since an earlier attempt to get a handle on masks (from written instructions) went down in flames, I am delighted with this ugly little map. :)
Note a bad start... but you probably need some more blur on the mask for the land/sand/grass layers. By chance, would that happen to be one I did? if so, I was just looking at that last night and thinking..man, I need to update this now that GIMP 2.8 is out....
Reading your "Explanation of Layer Masks in GIMP" a while ago got me all psyched up to give it a shot ...
but I putter around with an old copy of Photoshop 7 (mostly to rasterize PDFs to eliminate those tiny lines from vector fill patterns and save them as tiff files) so neither GIMP (any version) nor Photoshop CS were much help with figuring out how to work the Photoshop 7 Mask command. So that was epic failure number one ...
... but I still wanted to try out your tutorial techniques (plus some others that start with 'assume that you understand the basics of masks').
Written instructions from Adobe read like they were written in another language and translated with bablefish, but an online video on masks in Photoshop looked easy enough to give it a try.
So this is the result. I successfully created layers with masks that actually cover the parts that I wanted to cover and showed the parts that I wanted to show.
I agree that the transitions need work and the images were selected for size rather than content.
I can see some serious potential for many of the techniques taught on the Guild - and I don't really do maps in the traditional sense.
So thanks for the tutorial that originally inspired me (perhaps now I can actually give it a try) and the encouragement with my Ugly Map. ;)
Ah.. I thought you were talking about this. I failed to see the Photoshop part in the post the first time. That thread does something VERY similar to what you ended up making and used quite a bit of layer mask stuff in the videos(I am a layer mask Evangelist!!!!)
