Pretoria - WIP

[SereneParadox]

Well with that in mind ^.^ I agree that mountains like the one in Pasis' tutorial would look out of place. to clear up the coastlines, maybe go back to the flat black & white map created from the clouds and play with the sharpness? You might actually have to do some serious hand-editing. For the mountains, if you're going for hand-drawn antique style you should try the photoshop brushes created by PickeBu (on deviantart). At least one is called the "Old Map Brushset"; there are 3 sets, all of which contain quite a few very nice brushes. There's a forest set, a mountain set, and a sort of miscellanesou set. Everything looks like hand-drawn ink. I haven't used them yet, but I've played around with them and they're really nice looking. Hope those work for you, and looking forward to whatever you come up with, using these brushes or not! Good luck!

- Alizarine

Thanks. They look awesome, I downloaded them.

Once you get your landmass how you want it and then merge things so that the land is white and the sea is black on one layer then use Filter - Noise - Median with a setting of 1 or 2 and that will take out a bunch of tiny pixels. OR you could use the magic wand tool to click on the landmasses, then Filter - Select - Modify - Expand = 1, new layer fill with white and merge down. This also takes out stray pixels. OR you could use Filter - Pixellate - Crystallize = 12 (then go back with a 9 a 6 and a 3) then Image - Adjustments - Brightness/Contrast and max the contrast. OR you could make up a new technique. The bottom line is that there are many ways.

I'll try this, thanks Ascension.

I think a lot of that pixelization comes from the type of brush you use to 'create' the landmasses before merging the layers to create the base layer. It looks like Serene used a soft brush instead of a hard-edged circle brush, which creates that coastal effect. If you want smoother coastlines that still have interesting shapes, just use a hard-edged brush with a very low flow and change the size as needed.

Yeah, you're correct, I used a soft brush (the one mentioned in the tut), I will experiment with a hard one next time.

Thanks guys,
SP.