[Award Winner] Saderan – a tutorial

[Coyotemax]

Not sure what steps i might have skipped or misinterpreted, besides the river. you're right though, I find myself working with opacity/flow options more with the tablet in the last month or two than I ever have before. It's likely that a few of my typical habits made themselves known while I was working on a few things. That having been said - I learned a few new techniques to add to my methods, and in that respect your tutorial is 100% effective as a starting point for new ideas
(and even if it won't let me rep you yet, I did get to rate the thread at least!)

[Diamond]

Man, the people on this site continue to impress and amaze me.

Repped!

*edit: not repped yet; got to spread some love around first...

[Locution]

Thanks a bunch Tear. This looks like a great tut. I can't wait to put it into action.

[Katto]

Thanks a lot for sharing this wonderful tutorial with us, Tear.
I will definitely try it soon.

[Tom_Cardin]

Thanks for the wonderful tutorial! I went through it in about 5 hours so it wasn't terribly fast for me but I wanted to be sure I followed the steps exactly. This introduced me to even more ways to use photoshop and that really rocks.

The only difficulty I had was when it came to stroking the river paths. When I did it they looked very pixelated and after some diagnoses and various efforts I discovered the culprit was the stroke effect on the land layer mask. I changed it to a drop shadow with no distance and made it real tight and that got me a slight stroke that didn't pixelate the river paths. Rivers is where I spent most of the time...if I had skipped that part the rest was probably not much more than 2 hours.

I used this effort to create a world map which contains two regions I have mapped before, Voradin and The Wilderlands of Lords. This involved going back into the initial land mass set up and tweaking some of the areas out to create matching coastlines. Then following the same structure on the mountains, rivers and forest steps.

[Tear]

Thank you very much for giving it a try.
Are the soft, thin mountains a style choice of yours? Or did you hold back because I encouraged it a tad too much in the text?

[Tom_Cardin]

The scale of the mountains I did was out of choice. I was going for a whole world and wanted to keep the scale in a range that I thought worked.

[Janherbergh]

Thanks a lot! I loved your map and wanted to make as ggod as yours. I'll try to follow your tutorial for the one I'm making right now!

[Gary N. Mengle]

Holy cow, even the tutorial is gorgeous.

[Dalakmar]

Just wanted to thank 'Tear' for producing such a 'kick ass' tutorial and upload my first ever map using photoshop.