Harrum

[tilt]

looking much better... I'd clean out a lot of the small mountains though... perhaps put them in another layer and use them as base for hills instead

[Yandor]

thanks for the input, I'm still probably going to mess with the mountains, and see what I end up with.

I would of done more with the forests, but I'm falling asleep while messing with it, so I'm calling it quits for tonight and posting the updated progess.

Tell me what works and what doesn't!

[Juggernaut1981]

I'm just curious about how the oceans were done...

[Yandor]

Interesting you bring that up, all I can do is break down parts of it, because by the end I really don't know how I ended up with it =P. All with PS.

1. I used the clouds filter to get my ocean and land (using threshold), and made a new layer and used brushes to get the land shape I wanted and ocean as well.
2. Once I had the land I got a pattern, set it to black and white, did I think a 25 expand, with a 50 feather and cut out the deeper ocean with it, so now all I had was a "shelf" with the patter, I always made another layer and just did a white fade just like the pattern to bring out the shallower parts even more and added a gradient map to get the dark blue deeper parts, and light blue shallow.
3. before I turned on the gradient map, I had copied all the layers and pasted it as a flattened image did a color range to get the white parts and then did a lightening effect to get a bumpy texture over the entire ocean (shallow and deep)
4. once the gradient map was on, the bumpy texture was in, and I had the shallow to deep color difference. I had it all flattened, duplicated it and I color balanced both of them to get the extreme colors.
5. Once I did that I ran both through 2 different filters and blended them to bring out the colors even more. One of which was Accented Edges, the other one was Watercolor. The top layer with the water color (green ocean) was set to lighten as the blend mode.
6. then I messed around trying to get it to fit the land a bit better, smudging some spots etc.

In a nut shell thats what is.

Ocean1 or pic 1 is roughly around step 2.
Ocean Bottom & Top or pic 2 and 3 is before the filters, so around step 5
Ocean Bottom1 & Top1 or pic 4 and 5 is after the filters, so around step 5

[Yandor]

The this last image is pretty much the finished product, all this is the bottom right corner of the map.... Needless to say I may need to write an actual tutorial on how it was done...

If you want to take the sample pieces and mess around trying to get the filters the same go for it, that way you can get the same effect, just need to use the pattern here in the right way. I know all I did was colored the layer white, used a Vector Mask, and used the expand 25 and feather 50 plus land to show in the Mask, then I went into the layer style properties and did a patter overlay with the pattern and set scale to 20 and did a linear light blend. Hope this helps a bit.

[Ascension]

I use stylize - diffuse = anistropic before running accented edges and watercolor and that smooths things out a bit before acc ed runs lines all over everything.

[Yandor]

So its been a very long time since I've floated around here, work started, school started, and got a girl friend, life at home kind of evaporated... needless to say nothing really has changed, still super busy but I needed an escape and found myself on photoshop messing with my half completed experiment haha, well heres another update, not too much has really been added, just messed around with filters, and blending etc etc, I rather like the blend of everything, ocean I still love but still feel they need to be toned down somehow... but thoughts?

p.s. how I made the stylize changes... baha I don't even know yet, I did em a about a month ago... and just did some more cleaning up (mountains etc) so I'm still trying to figure out what I did =D

[Ascension]

The way that I tone down my oceans is to use the dark blue from the deep part of the ocean and put that solid color on a layer above the ocean, but below the land, and then reduce opacity and fiddle with blend modes. Sometimes those whites are just too vivid and look more like rapids than oceans so I've done my fair share of experimenting there. My 2 cents, give her a go

[Yandor]

Well I did a first attempt at toning down the oceans still donno if I like it yet, I also gave the mountains some more definition, and added more city areas in, I think the last few things for me to do, is to label, and add rivers, oohh and i added more forests

Thoughts? ideas? Suggestions??

[Yandor]

So I finally got another moment in my life to play with maps, I took another attempt at the ocean... I came up with different versions, tell me which one you like better.

Added rivers, next just need to add city names.

I think I liked the last 2 images (not the link only) the best...