Extruding details from source material for mapping.

[zorilya]

I've recently been trying a few techniques to use source material like a close up rock face and try to pick out and enhance details. This is meant to be a map of a region a little ways up a shallow mountain range.

Below is a before and after of the original picture and my work on reshaping it. I am yet to add a lot of details like settlements but the work I've done seems to achieve the goal of re-framing the picture in terms of scale, from a close up of a rock face to a birds-eye view of a region. This is really a test as I realized the source material was low resolution and so the map wouldn't stand up to zooming.



I have noticed that there is a significant "glare" that I believe is a bi product from a saturation layer that I used to draw some colour out of the rock. Any ideas on how to reduce this would be appreciated.

Method I used:
I started with a saturation map to draw out colour then a little extra shadow to build more features into the landscape.
Using the landscape, I ran rivers down on a colour blended layer to make the water appear a little more translucent.
I used a varying brush with a texture overlay to create trees that are spotted around the rivers and run off areas.

My next step is either to start over on a higher resolution source material or continue here adding more features like villages and POI.

Any feedback on the method and it's results, perhaps better ways to achieve this, would of course be appreciated.

Thanks for taking the time.

[Abu Lafia]

That's a fantastic and very inspirational idea zorilya, looking really great so far! Not sure what to do about the "glare" except experimenting with other layermodes (layerstyles it's called in PS i think...). In Gimp you can just "Desaturate" a layer, not sure how it's done in PS (i assume you're working with this program?). The cascades look awesome. The road on the other side seems still a bit too "straight" on the rocky underground in my view. Looking forward too see this develop. Keep up the wonderful work!

[Midgardsormr]

Try switching to 32-bit floating point mode before performing your saturation. It looks like it might just be clipping the color channels because they don't have enough range. You will have to switch back to 8-bit mode for the rest of the project, probably, but if you put in a Curves adjustment layer to roll off the brights so they don't clip before you do it, you should be able to preserve the details in those areas.

[zorilya]

Thanks for the idea. I'll give it a shot.