Trying out a woodcut effect

Was just playing around trying to get a nice-looking woodcut effect for an antique style map, since I had been having trouble getting one that I liked. The attachment is what I've got so far, and it's really close to what I'm looking for, but I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how to make it less even in relation to the coastline. I mean, I could always go over the whole coastline manually to make the woodcut more random all along the water edge, but the map I'm going to be using it on is rather large, and I'm hoping to find an easier method to achieve the same effect....

Looks like this week is all about synchronicity.. That effect looks very similar to the one I'm using :) I was looking to do the same thing with the randomization on my own current map. I ended up being happy with the way it looked as is, so I did not pursue my idea, but here it is..

What I was planning on doing was to generate a layer of rendered clouds (either the standard photoshop ones, or with the eyecandy Little Fluffy Clouds). Pop back to the land layer, make a selection, feather out to 100 and expand same. Use that selection on the cloud layer (likely invert the selection then delete everything else). From there it gets a bit fuzzier.. I think at that point, use the colour select to pick out all the black, or white, delete the appropriate one (maybe even do a layer of each for comparison to see what gives the best overall look) then run the woodcut effect on those layers, then overlay with the original woodcut outline and decide which one to keep.

As I say, I hadn't actually tried it so there may be some fine tuning needed, but that's the basic direction I was planning on.

Looks a lot like the ones I'm doing right now as well. I start with my land shape, expand the selection, new layer, fill with a pattern of stripes (1 black and 4 white), invert the selection and fill the rest with black, invert selection again and small ripple, invert again and feather the selection, invert the colors and then stylize - wind on the tips (to keep the ripple on the inner part and fade out the tips and wind works best on white for some reason), invert colors again, delete the whites, and lastly a small blur. I'll post mine up in my Tabletia thread right now if you want to see 'em.

Of course! Clouds! I'm not sure I quite follow where you're going Coyotemax, but I think I should be able to get what I'm looking for by deleting the clouds within the landmass area with the selection expanded by half the size of (or something close to that) the woodcut area, and selecting either the black or white to take some random chunks out of the edge :)

Ascension, I like your woodcut, but I feel like the wind you put on it is a little strong - at least for my tastes :) I recently found that using a 0.2 gaussian blur three times can give a really subtle soft blurring, that doesn't really sacrifice any crispness, if that makes any sense.

Makes sense to me, I do .2 three times as well.

Moutarde, glad i could inspire you :) It wasn't the specific process itself I was trying to get across (since I hadn't actually tried it) but the generalities. It'll be interesting to see the results once you actually work it out, I'm interested since I'm sure I'll want to do the same thing in the future! Good luck with it, I'm looking forward to seeing the results :)

Thanks ;) I'm hoping I'll have a chance to try it out today, but if not I'll almost certainly have something posted tomorrow!

Just wanted to link to another thread, which itself references, and links to, one of my fav woodcut maps, Uresia

http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...-Map-for-a-RPG


[edit]
Direct link to the full view of Uresia

http://temphis.deviantart.com/art/Ur...und-2-21967703

(2nd Edit) I wanted to try some of the techniques above, and here's what I came up with. I tend to "play" a lot, so it's hard for me to document all my steps - the the couple of posts above are what started me. Thanks.

Alright, here's the latest go around with, but with clouds!! 8)

Here's the process I used to create this - and remember it's not finished yet! :) Still need to adjust some of the selection values...

Create a pattern (1px w, 4px h) consisting of 1 black pixel at the top.
New document, 500x500 px. Fill the document with the 1x4 pattern and apply a 30% ripple to
it.
Size 12, 50% hard eraser. Spacing 90%. Size, Angle and Roundness Jitters at 100%,
minimum roundness 1%, all controls off. 100% scatter across both axes, count 10, count jitter
100%, all controls off. Opacity and Flow Jitters 100%, control off.
Go over the full document with the eraser. Change canvas size to 460x460 px. Define a new
pattern.
Create a new layer above and a new layer below your landmass. Render clouds on the layer
below, and fill the layer above with the new woodcut pattern.
Select your landmass, smooth by 8. Go to woodcut layer, delete. De-select and re-select
your landmass, inverse, contract by 10, smooth by 8, feather 12. Woodcut layer, delete.
Duplicate woodcut layer, merge down.
De-select and re-select the landmass. Expand by 6, smooth by 8, feather 12. Cloud layer,
delete.
Difference clouds x 5. Distort->Glass, distortion 5, smoothness 5, frosted. Replace colour
black with 50% grey, fuzziness 100.
Select colour range 75% grey, fuzziness 125. Woodcut layer, delete x 2.

This time around, a lot of my woodcut was looking kinda straight at the end, so I added another 30% ripple onto at the end of the process.