I have really enjoyed the nice sloping-to-a-point effects you can get with Bevel and Emboss Layer effects in Photoshop. So I asked myself, "Myself, How can I make heightmaps that look like that?," the answer...

I don't know.

Now, I remember the Morphological Erode filter. Now, I think anybody who is truly into making heightmaps for things like Bryce, gets a little flutter in their heart when they see that. The actual result was disappointing. To the point where I didn't even look at it again. The erosion filters in Bryce were better than that.

Some time later I saw the Erode and Dilate filters in Wilbur(on somebody else's PC). Hmmm...? You could enlarge or shrink continents. Interesting. Still it made them look kind of ugly. All kinds of circular terraces, like some kind of weird craters. Didn't work on my computer, anyway. Then there was Leveller, L3DT, Geocontrol and WorldMachine. It's almost enough to make a devoted mac-head want one of those hated windoze machines. Grrr. Then, I started playing with Dilate on the GIMP. Remember the original question? Well, I realized with a bit of noise and smoothing to disguise the the ugly flat craters, I had something. But I was really used to my Photoshop 7, and I was getting a little tired of the GIMP(sorry, GIMP lovers. It's not you, it's... it's me... ).

So, to make a long story... shorter than War and Peace, I found a way. Okay, enough with the introduction. I'm going to put the actual method in a separate post.