Hello from an admin on another board

[töff]

Aside ... off-topic ...

In layered maps, I think most of us put sea on the bottom, then basic dry land, then land features such as civlization (towns, roads) and terrain (mountains, forests, rivers) --

Wait, did he just says rivers? By gum, he did! As a layer on top of the basic dry land. And it MOSTLY makes sense to do it that way ...

But this approach, I think, might be one of the "complicated details" that leads to what I call the Estuary Conundrum. Where the rivers meet the sea (and they usually do), you have to blend the river layer (usually one of the topmost) with the sea layer (the bottom-most). And an embarrassingly large number of us otherwise-very-thoughtful mappers, with me at the head of the line, just don't pull this off well.

Has anybody ever tried doing rivers as "long skinny cuts into the dry land" layer? That, too, would have problems ... like how to get a river (thinking against the flow) from a beach up the side of a mountain.

The Estuary Conundrum. There it is. Solve it, and be great!
And post the solution!

[Midgardsormr]

Create a black-and-white map of your river system and apply it as a layer mask to each land/terrain layer. Now your ocean layer is showing through the land. Intersect the river mask with the ocean mask and add it to a new layer where you can do whatever styling of your rivers that you desire. Touch up the estuaries.

[töff]

Create a black-and-white map of your river system and apply it as a layer mask to each land/terrain layer.

That will work, but it violates one of the precepts I try to follow: never duplicate data. If you have your river map in more than one place, then every time you make a change to it, you have to update all the copies.

If Photoshop had instanced layers or channels, it'd be no problem. Dang, I wanted instances in Illustrator for roadmaps, and now I want them in Photoshop for rivers.

Maybe there's some clever way to get away with just one map/mask. It's worth experimenting with, next time I'm doing rivers.

[RPMiller]

That will work, but it violates one of the precepts I try to follow: never duplicate data. If you have your river map in more than one place, then every time you make a change to it, you have to update all the copies.

If Photoshop had instanced layers or channels, it'd be no problem. Dang, I wanted instances in Illustrator for roadmaps, and now I want them in Photoshop for rivers.

Maybe there's some clever way to get away with just one map/mask. It's worth experimenting with, next time I'm doing rivers.

But the layer mask is only one place. Isn't it? You wouldn't need a separate river layer is the mask was masking out the land to show water.

[Immolate]

Welcome NReeki. Your post has been hijacked by the river people. Bad river people. Now go mask your conundrums somewhere else!

Just kidding. It is a great honor for a river war to break out on your post.