[Award Winner] Making maps in Photoshop

[Jalyha]

Hi there. This is not my software, so I'm afraid I can't tell you *precisely* where you went wrong... however, I did notice several things right away that will probably help quite a bit.

1) Your colors are off. First of all, the colors are too bright, and unnatural. The shades you chose to highlight certain areas are too different from the base color. Finally, In 1.7 where it says:

Create a new layer, pick another colour and draw in areas where you want it to change. don't worry about
how it looks just now. you can be quite sketchy about it. Make sure you have the LAND areas selected only.
You can create a new layer for every colour you use if you want to go back over areas and redo.

I'm fairly certain this is referring to new layers for *piling up* your colors.

EXAMPLE:



(Don't worry about the buttons, it's a different program... just look at the main image, and the layers.)

These colors won't blend as well as others, but I wanted to hurry, and I wanted enough contrast for you to see what I was doing.

This doesn't have any kind of blur yet, it's just color painted on different layers.

Now:

2) In the tutorial it specifically mentions a merged layer. If you don't want to risk messing up your land shapes, I'd make a COPY of each layer before continuing.

BUT what you really need is one layer that has ALL of your colors on it. THUS:



On YOUR project, you'll still have a lot of other layers. I'm not doing anything else with this, so I don't really need them, and made no copies. What you DO need is one layer with ALL of your colors on it.

3) Finally, I *believe* the "blur" mentioned was a TOOL, not an effect. Like your paintbrush.



I don't know which is the "blur" tool on your software, but it should tell you. *I* am using "smudge" (the pointing finger) in this image:



And "Blur" in this one (and after a quick google search I believe it might have something to do with the tiny arrow on the button for your smudge tool):



Finally, the same step mentions darkening the outline of your landmasses which will also help achieve the effect in the tutorial.

Hope this helps a bit. Best of Luck!

[wreed58]

Hi there. This is not my software, so I'm afraid I can't tell you *precisely* where you went wrong... however, I did notice several things right away that will probably help quite a bit.
....

I appreciate your help, however the effect you achieved above is not nearly as clean and good looking as the one in the tutorial...