Welcome to Kular.

I'm using Photoshop CS4. I'm also borrowing CC3 structures to represent my cities and keeps.

I used Tear's tutorial to get the land masses and deep water where I wanted them. I'm using ideas from Pasis' Terrain Creation Tutorial. Originally, I was going to use Zaramis' Relatively Realistic Mountains, which has worked well for me in the past, but a test run had me pulling my hair out as I couldn't get the look I wanted. I'm borrowing ideas and testing a lot of my own.

Here's what the B&W looks like [White is land] at 16.6% scale:

Click image for larger version.  Name: KularB&W.png  Views: 186  Size: 70.5 KB  ID: 40697

I went through the Tear tutorial to get the coastlines and oceans in. When I got to the land section, I deviated and stopped the tutorial. Although the brownish land color was crisp, I knew I'd be using a hybrid of Pasis/me going forward and didn't want to have to lay down grass all over the world in detail, so rather than add the brownish foreground color, I decided to add a grass pattern I like. When I first put it down, I was horrified at the easily discernible redundant pattern [still 16.6% scale]:

Click image for larger version.  Name: KularColor.png  Views: 179  Size: 1.35 MB  ID: 40698

The red arrow denotes the section I have been working on the past two days. It's near completion and has everything in place: Snow pack, mountains, forest, cities, placenames, etc., so I could see how things might look when I do the whole map. I did this small test section in order to keep it all compartmentalized. As you can see from the above image, at 16.6% it's really fuzzy and ugly.

It looks a whole lot better at 100%:

Click image for larger version.  Name: Barony of Terkal.png  Views: 204  Size: 584.2 KB  ID: 40699

I'm working at 150-400% as it allows me a bit more room to work with my fat fingers.

Things I'm wondering about:
1. Is the complete use of Trajan Pro overdoing it? Should I use a different font for city names, rivers, mountains, etc.? If so, suggestions?
2. The Photoshop file is 661MB right now and I have sooooo much more to do. I have over 200 GB on the drive I have the file on. I'm sure this will be enough. However, it takes a lot to load and save. Any tips on truncating layers/sections to improve performance of loads and saves? I'd like to save often, but don't want to wait 5 minutes to do so.

Feel free to voice your comments and questions.

-Pi