First attempt FT + Photoshop

[feanaaro]

This is my first post, so to begin I want to thanks everybody who contributed to this wonderful site, from which I stole a lot of material and ideas for this project.
In particular, I am indebted to the terrain creation tutorial by Pasis, the FT tutorial by a2area, and to the many people which posted interesting textures in various threads (of which regrettably I did not kept track, so I cannot thanks everyone by name, sorry).

However, my general aim is to obtain a method to quickly draw good-looking maps (for rpg and/or narratives), even if not particularly inspired (I have zero autonomous artistic capacities, sorry).
So I started from fractal terrains, tinkered quite a bit with it then export an high resolution (5000*3000) bmp to work with photoshop.
Here there are my preliminary results. The first is an image of the entire continent (which includes most of the land in the world, perhaps 3/4), with just some post-processing but without added elements like cities, forests etc. The second is a regional map of an area in the norh-east; here with forests, cities, roads. The area should roughly be 1300*900km, it looks smaller to my eye, but I have trouble in exporting the background from FT in an higher resolution (so that cities and the like could be smaller in proportion) because it tends to show the "fractal pattern" at higher level of zoom. The alternative is to ditch the pseudo-pictorial style for cities and fields, but I would rather not.





I am really looking for advices since I am not quite satisfied with the results. Notice that I am really new to photoshop and 99% of what I know come from the aformentioned tutorial (so do not be exceedingly technical!).