Redrobes: Oh sorry. pretty cool stuff.
Ghalev: That sounds interesting. got anything up on the web to see the result? it'l be good to see how that comes out.
Today in PS I've been playing with the bevel tool on a selection of the land mass ( using the bevel and you can give it fall off and soften under the chisel settings and lighting at 0 (from the top)) - it give a similar mountain range with some randomness. Then overlayering difference clouds and manually drawing in the troughs with soft black brush at 20% opacity.
Still exploring the technique and will include it in a tutorial as another step on the way to DEM influecned maps. It'll be cool if there was a plugin that worked similar to bevel, but in a more fractual, mountainous way to create a height map for fictional maps. I guess simliar to Bryce's fractual mountain heightmap creations but for PS so it could be places over a larger selection area.
thanks folks!