Photoshop Query: Opacity and Colour Build Up

[The Dragon]

Greetings all,

I'm currently designing my maps in Photoshop in a renaissance style. I'm going for a lot of plain colours with a low opacity which blend and flow to other colours, which is a great way to build up border zones.

However my problem lies with large areas. I find that I have to colour regions in in one go or risk taking my stylus off and having the colours build up if I colour over the same area twice. Is there a way to disable this build up?

Many thanks

[Midgardsormr]

Instead of using a low opacity in your brush, you could paint on a new layer with the brush at full opacity but the layer at reduced opacity. Then you could treat the edges with a low-opacity eraser to get your blending, then merge down. I may not fully understand your workflow, though.

[The Dragon]

This is a pretty good idea, one I hadn't considered. My next map i'll try this.

I'm painting over a pre-stained canvas for that parchment look. Here is my latest map, hopefully you'll see what I mean...

http://www.cartographersguild.com/re...rritories.html

[BraveSirKevin]

Instead of using a low opacity in your brush, you could paint on a new layer with the brush at full opacity but the layer at reduced opacity. Then you could treat the edges with a low-opacity eraser to get your blending, then merge down. I may not fully understand your workflow, though.

A slightly modified version of this idea is to paint bucket in a full strength solid layer of the colour desired and then add a layer mask. Make the mask completely black and then paint white onto it where you want your colour to show through. If you want to limit the opacity, you could use a mid-range grey instead of white and set the brush mode to "Lighten" and give it a low opacity. If chose to paint the mask with a brightness 70% grey, you'd never have any area with more than 70% opacity for example.

The main benefit of doing it this way is that you could use a texture instead of a flat colour... but also that erasing out areas is not destructive. You erase by painting black on to the mask, so if you take out more than you mean to, you can simply paint it back in with white.