Thread: Photoshop users: Can you help me to get this tutorial to work?

Thanks SG...I'm thrilled with the result and will be using them a lot. I really like the way there are little gaps betwen them and how, on the edges and with the smaller patches you have individual circles visible which suggest a single tree. Got to find a way of doing this without using 3rd party filters though.

Attached is a upscaled version by increasing the canvas size from 1,000 square to 2,000 square - would have probably been better if I'd started at that canvas size.

Oh stupid me! You don't need any selections, fills or filters at all! All you need is a small hard round brush with lots of spacing and variable size, count and scattering and the rest can all be done with layer styles. I didn't use a tablet and pen for this, but using one you could have more control over the size, scattering etc. (Although I suppose if you have vast amounts to do, a selection and filter would be faster).

The only 'trick' is not to put too many trees on one layer, but to build them up over a number of layers so the bevelling of each tree stays round. Here's a quickie, I've also added a slight stroke and drop shadow to the layer style to give the forest some depth and the appearance of canopies over other canopies.

Ha Ha! After spending hours on this, it was so simple in the end!

You don't even need layers if you use color dynamics on your brush. Pick a dark olive green and a light yellow-green, use a scatter brush, click on the brush editor, increase the scatter and spacing if you want, click on color dynamics, you can mess around with all of the sliders but there's only one important thing that you really need - set foreground/background jitter to pen pressure. The foreground color will come by pressing hard and the background color will come by pressing lightly. If you're using a mouse then it's more like a noise fill - evenly distributed dots of varying color. Oh, and uh, pay no attention to that lil thumbnailer in the top right corner, nothing to see there, move along

Oh man that's beautiful!

It wasn't the colours that was the problem it was getting the rounded bevelled shape on each tree rather than having so many trees (dots) on a single layer that the bevel made them lose their definition into a wriggle shape.....does that make sense? Hang on, I'll post an example of what I mean.

Oh sure, I understand...mine had no layer styles at all on it because I've tried it this way (what you're showing) and I always hated how they end up clumping together. So for that multiple layers work great to avoid the clumping. Or you could add opacity and flow jitter (brush editor - other dynamics). The opacity and flow jitter will mean that some shapes are more clearly defined and others are hazier so that when you add a bevel the shapes don't blend together as much. On my previous pic I used a 14 pixel scattered dry brush (a default) and on this one I used 5 pixel soft round and 9 pixel soft round. If you were to use this in pencil mode then you could add a stroke to define the tree edge but you'd get some clumping there due to overlap.

I hate you, Ascension. Even your screeshots look like works of art

The really nice thing about layering the treetops is that I think you can have any opacity or layer style you like for each layer and, if you have 5 or six layers, it will somehow magically fit into looking righ with the rest of them.

Sure sure, more layers means more flexibility. Hey, you know what? If you were to use this with like a big square pencil tip then you could make fields.