Okay here's something that I whipped up since my last post (approx 2 hours of work). Mainly what I wanted to focus on was three things: ocean color, mountain color, and overall texture.
I put your B&W image into a 2000 pixel square, desaturated it (to remove any possible colors) filter-pixellate-crystallize at 12, 6, and 3 to break up the coast, then filter-noise-median at 2 to smooth it a bit. Renamed it "base", inverted the colors (ctrl-i) and deleted the blacks.
Added clouds on the background layer, duplicate that then filter-difference clouds (two times) to give me a base texture for the mtns. They're not exactly in the same place as yours but I'm more interested in describing a process for ya. Filter-render-lighting effects, delete the blacks add my normal layer style and name this layer "mtns". Copy this layer and change the brown color overlay to a green (color code 465A1E) set to color instead of soft light at 20% opacity. Added an inner glow of the same color set to multiply at 75% opacity and size of 51...this sort of gives us a dark ring around the mtns like a forest and it turns the brown mtns from below to something greener.
For the land I duplicated the background clouds again and ran a lighting effects with the 5 omni lights. Trimmed it to fit via the ctrl-click on the base layer, invert, delete. Color overlay of a dark olive green, inner bevel with lowered opacities and big size. Call this layer "land". Duplicate this layer and remove all styles except the color overlay, change the color to something brighter, add an outer glow of something light green, and lastly a light tan stroke.
Duplicate the background clouds again, add some noise (5%) and run the omni lighting again. Delete the blacks, trim to fit, and add a 5-pixel emboss and call this layer "hills".
Duplicate the background clouds again and move it to the top of the layer stack. Duplicate the base layer and move it to the top. Outer glow of white with a low opacity (and a size of 100) and turn the layer's opacity down low as well. Merge down, lighting effects, gradient map of some various blues and call this layer "ocean". Move it under the land layer.
I added a continental shelf as well because I have some weird obsession with doing so. I plopped down some rivers and forests and then duplicated the land layer, removed all styles and set it to multiply and renamed it to "land bump". Then I did the same thing for the mtns. This gives us a bit more contrast and definition and texture for our terrain.
Here's a quick lil bit on getting your colors right:
Black is 0, 0, 0; white is 255, 255, 255; and middle gray is 128, 128, 128 (in RGB mode). These three numbers correspond to red, green, and blue (it's a science thing and not an art thing). So straight blue is 0, 0, 255. It's very vivid so in order to mute it change it to something like 0, 0, 100. I like to add in a bit of green to give me more of an ocean feel. I'll usually go 50-90% as much green as blue so for this I have 0, 75, 100. Adding red to this mix will take us closer and closer to gray so I added 25. This gives me the darkest part of my ocean; the lightest part is 128, 188, 205.
For doing greens I like mine to be sort of an olive color or a swampy green color. Straight green on a computer is 0, 255, 0 and is very vivid and bright and light. Because computers were not developed by painters we have to add red in order to get yellow (idiots, in real life red + green [which is yellow + blue] = dark brown). This results in 255, 255, 0 for straight yellow, it's bright and vivid. For a good land color I'll go 70, 90, 65 and for forests I'll go 56, 64, 0. If we add any blue (the last number in our system) we'll get closer to gray so for a good swampy color I'll go 48, 64, 32...a dark swamp.
For deserts we start with yellow 255, 255, 0. For a good tan color we decrease the green and to make it all lighter we add in some blue. Crazy, I know. A good tan will also be overall darker. For my tans I am usually around 180, 140, 90 and for the lighter parts I'm around 255, 224, 192.
Quite long-winded, sorry about that. If you've followed along my tut then you should have some basic idea as to the steps that I've described here. If you'd like we can break it down into smaller parts and I can be more descriptive (and probably even more gas-baggy).
Edit -- holy smokes, it took me 45 minutes to type this out...I gotta learn to type better.
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