Creating mountains and terrain blending.

[Chashio]

Yes, you can do it in photoshop with a bit of work (probably with GIMP, but I haven't used it in years and can't remember the vocabulary translations). I've been working on a similar something recently and can point you in a very general direction to look into... I know there are many tutorials around that cover these things much better than I could ever explain them.

Height maps/bump maps (greyscale images that show low areas as dark and high areas as light) are a large part of it. That's how you get raised relief terrain like in that world map you pointed to (they likely used one like this, but not in photoshop: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=73934). Here's a good tutorial for how to go about it: http://www.michaeldashow.com/tips_bumpmaps.html.

For shading such as the tutorial which waldronate provided (thank you for that, by the way - reps coming) you can play with gradient maps in photoshop, again combined with the original height map (duplicate that layer(place it above the shaded relief layer), probably change the layer style to color, and you may want to heighten the contrast a bit if you find that the shading is too subtle for your taste).

For shading natural vegetation in photoshop, you can use the paint brush and common sense. =)

Hope that's somewhat helpful.

EDIT: Actually, I decided to go a little more in depth. http://www.cartographersguild.com/sh...961#post195961