My Very First Attempt

[Alfar]

Not bad for a first shot. I think your way of representing forests is interesting, gives a different style than what we're used to seeing here.

I'm afraid that pretty much all your rivers are acting oddly. I'd suggest looking over the river threads:

http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=3822
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=2927

The basic rules are that rivers start as thin streams; always flow downhill; join up as they go; and very rarely split. Lakes have one or more input streams, and only one output stream.

Other than that, you may want to make the clouds effect more subtle. For the sea, you can try making it darker the deeper the water (ie. the farther away from shore.)

The coastline is rather straight in places, where I'd expect someting a bit more jagged. Especially at the top where you have a long stretch of clean horisontal coast.

And what's with the ridge around the whole continent? For a moment I thought it was a road, but it's not really connecting the cities.

I don't know anything about Photoshop Elements, so not sure how to fix the things I mentioned above. If you have your different elements on different layers (and you should), you may be able to use filters to muck up the coast line, I think. Also, noise could be your friend, and depending on the style you're going for, the bump map filter.

Edit: Heh... ninja'ed. I type too slowly. What he said.