Quick and Easy Land Sculpting in Photoshop

[RecklessEnthusiasm]

This is a good technique for creating nice hills and valleys, but it can be simplified a little with a neat PS trick, though:

1.) Have your base ground texture, then create a new transparent layer above it.
2.) Apply your bevel/emboss layer effect, and lower the "fill" (the number right beneath the layer opacity) to 0%.
3.) On this top layer, use whatever brushes you want (color doesn't matter because it won't show up with fill at 0). Just spray it on like you did before, and you'll basically just be painting the height effect directly on.

This saves you the extra step of defining a pattern and ticking the 'pattern overlay.' Fill is almost the same as opacity, but it tells PS to continue to show the layer effects, just not whatever you've painted on the layer.

Hope this helped!