[Award Winner] My atlas style in PS

[Ascension]

You have to duplicate the ocean layer.

[Nokomys]

Ok I know it has to be duplicated... I guess maybe I did not make it clear.. sorry... I am redoing this and here is where I am currently confused...
Step 8 says "8. Click back on the “ocean” layer (on the layers palette) and duplicate it. Grab a big airbrush and at the top of the screen reduce the flow to 10%. I start with the Airbrush soft round 300 and use smaller airbrushes as needed. Use black to define the ocean and white to define the land.

Then Step 10 says "10. When happy, duplicate this layer (it will be named “ocean copy”) and click on the “base” layer. Link the “base” and “ocean copy” layers together; on the layer palette you will see a box with an eye and a box with a brush in it – the brush means that this is the active layer and the eye means that the layer is visible. If you click in an empty box a chain will appear...this is the link. Once the layers are linked then merge down (ctrl+e) or Layer > Merge down.

so on this when looking at it.. I would see Ocean ... Ocean Copy ... Ocean Copy Copy.
So do you paint on Ocean Copy and then duplicate it [ocean copy copy] then link ocean copy copy to Base and merge? because this is what I would have. Right now I have [in order from bottom to top] Background / Ocean / Ocean Copy [which I have painted on to fix the ocean / Base.] Do I duplicate Ocean copy then link and merge it to base? I hope I am not confusing you hehe.

** Correction it makes Ocean Copy 2...

P.S. Sorry to be a pain in the butt....

[Ascension]

No you should have ocean and ocean copy and base. When base merges down to ocean copy, if linked, the resulting layer will be named base. At that point you should have ocean and base.

[Nokomys]

ah ok. now I follow, I do apologize again for being a pain it just for some reason could not wrap my head around it and was so confused.

[Nokomys]

Now that I have that straight, I had a question about the position of the layers on your instruction it says:
20. You should have 6 layers; from top to bottom: “base”, “mountains” and “hills” (all hidden) then “land”, “ocean” and “background” (all visible) and you should still be on the “land” layer.

Currently I have Mountains, Hills, Base, Ocean, Background. I ran into this on the other attempt and when i moved it [Base] to the top to match what your instruction had there I had more problems with what was displayed. Also when I attempt to start adding the color instead of the landmass being filled gradient the sea fills.
Image set 3. I will keep trying to get this figured out and post if I solve it but in the meantime if you get a chance to look at it let me know what you think I did wrong. Thank you... *NOTE I did move Base to the top to match what you listed in the screen shots and then tried to add on the gradients. =)

[Nokomys]

Ok I had to skip Select>Inverse to get it right.

[Nokomys]

another update.. I feel stupid now as I discovered that I did indeed totally miss a step.. Hide base and duplicate ocean to name it hills. I had been duplicating Base and then moving forward. I bet it all works perfectly now. lol jeesh.. thank you for putting up with me and sorry I spammed the forums here. I think I may be ok now. I'll post a image when it is done.

[Ascension]

No problem, man...happens all the time. I write difficult tuts so people are bound to get confused so I do my best to help.

[Nokomys]

Ok I did indeed get something that looked pretty good. I will probably follow the rest of the tut later on but now I got a wild hair to experiment a bit with the process now that I have an idea how to do some of it.
Here is what I stopped with.. Click Me I spent some time looking at the River Police stuff and I hope that I did not violate the laws of river hehe but I am not to sure.

[Ascension]

Looks like you stopped before adding layer styles to the hills and mountains but looks like you have it down.