How to create shaded relief maps in Photoshop

[pyrandon]

Awesome finds! Thanks!!

[ravells]

I'm picking the Carto Talk forum clean of items that might be relevant to us here! There are some amazing tutorials / words of wisdom there and the people are really nice too. Most of them are pros both academic and industrial. A lot of the terms they use are just beyond me and I'm reading everything I can from there at the moment. It really is an education.

[pyrandon]

Yeah, keep doing that!

I just popped over there too--it is a nice forum! They were very helpful and supportive of your maps, I saw, ravs. I'll bet we could learn a lot from them!

Thanks for this work. (I definitely plan to steal the forest technique from the above map!)

[ravells]

I think they were being extremely polite. I felt like a five year old handing my scribbles to Da Vinci and asking him for his opinion.

Do read the thread on 'Bad Maps' in the Cartography Design section. It's a fascinating insight into the tensions between professionally trained Cartographers and Graphic Designers and what Cartography means. There is a super essay on the subject posted in that thread too. I suspect it's just up your street Don. I was riveted anyway!

In fact I even pinched my new sig quote from there!

Ravs

[RobA]

Yeah -

I noticed you two popping up there (I subscribed to their RSS feed)!

-Rob A>

[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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[Robber Baron]

Anybody else having trouble accessing the features of that board? I've registered but can't look at maps, post topics or even PM the Admins. Any ideas?