Part 5
Use the magic wand tool to select the land, go to Select > Similar to select all that black crap, and make a new layer above everything else. Now pick a green color, preferably not too bright or saturated, and fill the selection with it. Deselect it and you have yourself some land, matey. Make a new layer under that and fill it with a blue, and behold the azure fields (see step24). You could also put a layer style on the water, such as the one you downloaded at the beginning.
Now it’s time to whip out those mountain brushes you downloaded. Open up the mountain brushes and the mountain layer style. Apply the mountain layer style to a new layer. The brushes should appear in the Tool Presets area just under the History panel beside the zoom settings (see step25).
Now, before you go mountain-happy, select the land by Ctrl+clicking on the little thumbnail for the land layer, that way you only brush on the land and not over the rivers or ocean. Now brush some mountains roughly where the heightmap suggested. For particularly high mountains you can brush over it a couple of times. Once you have most the mountains on there, make a new layer with the same layer style and brush some smaller mountains on there for some added detail (see step26). You could also use the provided layer style for snow and brush some snowy peaks on those mountains.
The map doesn’t seem to pop out a whole lot yet, so Ctrl+select the land layer’s thumbnail and make a new layer. Now, with black selected as foreground color, stroke this sucker again, outside, at about 2 pixels. Don’t deselect yet. Make a new layer again and now go to Select > Modify > Expand and go about 10 pixels or so. Stroke that sucker again. Repeat as desired. Then set this layer on overlay. Now you have a fancy coastline (see step27).
/highfive
Now’s where you have some choices to make based on your map. Now is the step where you should customize the terrain, such as making desert, tundra, forests, etc. (Note: Any brushing of details onto the land should be done whilst the land has been selected, so that you are not brushing over rivers) For desert, you could just make a layer of pale yellow and brush with a soft brush where you think it should go. For tundra, perhaps a grayish color, or a white for some severe permafrost. Steppes could be a yellow or brown, perhaps. For forests, you could use this little trick: Use the provided layer style and brush a forest with a soft brush. Now, make a new layer above the forest, select both, and merge them together. This makes the layer style become the layer, and allows you to change the forest’s blending to darken, which will get rid of the somewhat bothersome white inbetween the trees. It is also suggested that you Ctrl+select the mountains’ thumbnails and delete the forests from those areas. This will make sure that the forests cover a small amount of the mountains without covering the most treacherous crags. Now you could select the forest area and on a new layer underneath that fill with black, set to overlay and 10% opacity, and nudge a bit so that you have a nice shadow for your forest (see step2.
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