[Award Winner] Making maps in Photoshop

[jezelf]

woo-hoo! I got an award! Cool! - Thank you for that, and the stars! Nice surprise. Glad to hear the tutorials are helpful to you.

Also happy to hear it's readable - a few typos slipped through I noticed, so I'll go through and sort them out this weekend (sorry anout those). I feel it's probably too verbose but I like to try and write a tutorial as if my own feeble mind was going to follow it. Sometimes I can get stumped at the first step as I try to navigate around various programs UIs and termology.

The great thing about this place is that there are so many handy tutorials. I've always been a firm believer in sharing knowledge ( from personal experience of trying to work things out and wasting so much time on trial and error). It also good discovering new things - from that I didn't know were possible and within my current skill, to learning new stuff to raise it.

Tancread: I noticed that ViewDale - Instant Island (Thanks to Redrobes for that one ) could give similar results than going through all the Difference Clouds thing I mention. You can then import it into PS and use levels on it. The added advantage of using Instant Island is that it also generates a height map. ( BTW, II saves your created file to C:\Program Files\ViewingDale folder - It wasn't obvious to my feeble mind at first )

cheers!
Jez

[Tancread]

Thanks for the tip, playing with the island generator now.

[RobA]

Just wanted to point out this tutorial for gimp (which should be transferable to photoshop) on creating not so random coastlines. It is a bit easier than the cut/paste/rotate/fit process you follow.

You could also probably apply a difference clouds several times at step 4 to make it a bit rougher, but you would want to make the initial blur smaller.

-Rob A>

[Grimmr]

What happened to these tutorials? I viewed them a few weeks ago and now I get a 404 Error when I go there. Does anyone have these saved in any format?

[Lachasso]

beautiful map, thanks

[Moonblade]

Fantastic tutorial. I'm a novice photoshop user, but the step-by-steps are very easy to follow. I tried it out and in mere 2 hours I've made a good progress and even made a few modifications of my own.

http://i1221.photobucket.com/albums/...Shrine-Cip.jpg

Thank you again, jezelf.

[Redrobes]

Tancread: I noticed that ViewDale - Instant Island (Thanks to Redrobes for that one ) could give similar results than going through all the Difference Clouds thing I mention. You can then import it into PS and use levels on it. The added advantage of using Instant Island is that it also generates a height map. ( BTW, II saves your created file to C:\Program Files\ViewingDale folder - It wasn't obvious to my feeble mind at first )

Just checked and it saves to the current folder so if you have installed it to C : \ Program Files\ViewingDale then thats where the saves go to. Its a single .exe so you can take the app and put it where ever you want and run it from there. Or you could create a (or modify the desktop) shortcut and edit the current directory for it. I think that should put the saves in that place too. The intention was to put the InstantIslands and the DragonFlight in the same dir and then run II, save a terrain out and then run DF and then you get the 3D view of the island terrain in one shot.