WIP - Ascension's Photoshop Town Tutorial Follow-Along

[phatticus]

31. Duplicate this layer (it becomes River base copy 3). On the layer stack, right click on this layer and choose Clear Layer Style. Ctrl+click on the River base layer to load it as a selection. Select > Modify > Contract = 50. Select > Feather = 50. Select > Inverse. Hit the delete key then deselect. What this does is cut our river away from the edge because we want our edges to be shallow (and therefore we can see some of that yummy mud). Lastly, set the fill of this layer to zero (on the layer stack).
32. This layer gets 3 layer styles. First, we put in a Color overlay of a medium gray with a hint of blue, hex code 505A64 (RGB 80, 90, 100). Set the opacity at 90%. Second, we add an Inner glow of a medium gray, hex code 606060 (RGB 96, 96, 96). Set the mode to overlay, opacity at 50%, and size is 100. The reason that our gray is not 50% gray is because in overlay mode it is invisible; so by setting it to be darker than 50% gray the overlay acts to darken things up. Lastly, we add an Outer glow to enhance our sandy river bank. I went with a sand color, hex code E9E2B4 (RGB 233, 226, 180). Mode is soft light, opacity is 100%, and size is 100. This might not look like much but just wait to see what happens after the next few steps. You will notice that I went and smoothed my bumps with a big airbrush.

I played around with the Contract and Feather sizes. 50px was too much for my narrow river, and I ended up with 30px.