My first (real) map

[Baxder]

Hey all, I'm new here. I'm just gonna copy what I posted elsewhere her to explain my first project, which I intend to detail here:

I have had a homebrew world that has spent years in pitiful penciled mediocrity as I've dreamed of coming across someone who could turn it into something respectable. In the meantime I've gained PS experience, but never had to use it creatively like this, so couldn't put the pieces together to do so. Now I find this, read it, and realize I can do it! I'm adapting it to base the land masses on my hand-drawn map, which I hope will be helpful to someone.

All I did was scan the fore-mentioned map, trace the coastlines and fill in the inland bodies of water with a small black brush (on another layer, of course), then fill the oceans black with the paint bucket. Make that the background layer for the "Clouds/Threshold" set, and tweak the clouds layer opacity to taste. I went with 60-ish%. After some cleaning up, it broke up the coast nicely, filled the oceans with various, surprisingly geologically sound archipelligos, and added a few inland lakes for my consideration. (See attached). That's as far as I've got so far, having to restart the process twice for various failures on my part to pay attention to some important details that really messed things up later that I couldn't figure out how to fix.

I'm going to need some help down the road with a few features not specifically covered in the tutorial linked above. Does anyone have an idea for making large plateaus, like mongolia-style? I could also use help making a few smaller, yet still very large ridges, and several small but very tall rock spires.

Thanks! I'm sure my stay will be short-lived, but I'd appreciate any help you guys can give me, and I'll try to contribute things I figure out along the way.

Don't know if I did that quite right. Note the parenthetical numbers for the viewing order of the jpg's. Also note the selected layer in the screenshots. I suppose it'd be helpful to reference the tutorial linked above to follow what's going on as well. Again, I hope this can help someone!