How to create shaded relief maps in Photoshop

[OneSeventeen]

(First attempt at trying to attach an image.) I downloaded the first PDF and sort of loosely followed it, speeding through. Instead of a grey-scale elevation thingie, I used random Phtoshop clouds (I didn't know how else to generate a decent grey-scale image that would do).

I did some funny cutting and pasting to cut the original clouds into two bits: land and ocean (on separate layers) and then made the other part transparent (land transparent on the ocean layer and ocean transparent on the land layer). I then did as the tutorial said with applying gradient maps. I added the lighting effect only to the land layer, though.

This looks a bit odd to me, but I think this is somewhat workable as a starting point for a longer effort. Notice that the coast lines seem to pop up from the oceans... This is because I had the oceans set to black and the coast-line was some medium-ish grey (picked a la threshold). Also notice that there are odd shallow spots in the deep parts of the ocean and not deep parts where you'd expect. Also the whole thing is a bit too bumpy for my tastes. I think most of this could be worked around. I'm going to keep playing with this, but I thought I'd share my results (notice I didn't do any trees or anything, of course).


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