[Award Winner] Making a continent in photoshop

[zKaZy]

pretty cool your tuto, thanks!!!!

[raejekii]

There was a very large part of me that just died out of joy, and I'm almost positive that my kidney was part of that...i heard a large boom just now from somewhere in that general vacinity.

That map is amazing! I've been looking for a long time for a decent tutorial on how to make a map like that. Thank you so much!

[DMJay]

Sorry to repeat the need for help, but I'm having a little trouble here:

8. Create a new layer and Edit > fill = 50% gray. Set the layer’s mode to hard mix and change the name to “base”.

// When I followed these steps the layer keeps coming out as a giant gray mass. No blotches or anything. Not sure if I'm doing something wrong. The Fill Content Use: 50% Gray, and for the Blending I'm using the Hard Mix. Do I need to reduce the opacity or something?

EDIT: HAHA! I figured it out. I was changing the Hard Mix inside the Fill rather than changing the blending mode on the layer to Hard Mix. A little confusing I guess, but it's probably because I'm not too good with the technical terms of PS.

[Steel General]

EDIT: HAHA! I figured it out. I was changing the Hard Mix inside the Fill rather than changing the blending mode on the layer to Hard Mix. A little confusing I guess, but it's probably because I'm not too good with the technical terms of PS.

Run through this tutorial a few times, and you'll have a pretty good working base knowledge for using Photoshop.

[DMJay]

Hmm. Do you know in Step 34 which layer you're supposed to be adding the reversed gradient to? I'm not sure I played around with it by moving it to different layers, but never quite got the same effect that is illustrated in Step 39.

I'm not entirely sure what I did wrong, but it's obvious I didn't follow one of the steps completely.

[DMJay]

There's the final. Thanks for this tutorial. It's amazing!

[Ascension]

The layer with the bas relief; I might lower the opacity or erase a bit to leave more flatland to put towns n stuff. Not a big thing. Otherwise, looks great, man.

[Edward Protera]

Love this tutorial. I got frustrated at first because I was trying to do this in Photoshop Elements 7, which doesn't have much in the way of layer style editing, but then I remembered that I still have CS lying around. Here's what I've got so far! I decided to remove the ice and desert parts of the gradient, since I plan to add more complex climate zones later.

[Ascension]

Looks good, man.

[JiveMiguel]

Excellent tutorial! Here's what I came up with. I know this has problems, (the lakes in southern edge are too close to the ocean... erosion would have turned them into bays), but this was just a test run. It took me about 2 hours and is pretty easy to follow.

What version of Photoshop are you using? I have 7 and it seems to be a little different from what you must be using, especially in the select -> color range options. I've included a quick shot of that dialog box, and as you can see, I can't select 'black'. So I use the eyedropper on the image and try to get the closest to black I can get. I think not having this feature has led to the very 'wavy' ocean... the waves are a little harsh because I couldn't select true black.

Thanks for this tutorial! I'm going to see if I can find a newer version of Photoshop sometime here soon.

* EDIT * I just realized that as long as my colors are black/white before I select color range, it seems that I can click on the black color palette in the tool bar and get black. Is that how you're doing it? Thanks again!