Well let's get started. First, you need to have your continent set up. Here is mine in screen 1.
1. Create a new layer then grab the 100 pixel soft round airbrush and make white the foreground color.
2. Draw in where you want your mountains. Try to put your lines next to one another to represent the "folding of the land" phenomenon. screen 2.
3. On the layer stack hold down the ctrl key and click on the little icon at the bottom for "create a new layer". This will create a new layer but with the ctrl key being held down the new layer will go below the current layer instead of the default above. Fill this layer with black.
4. Click back on the layer with the white lines. Duplicate this layer and hide the original lines layer below this new layer.
5. Filter - Blur - Gaussian Blur = 5 pixels. On the layer stack, ctrl + click on this current layer then Select - Inverse (in CS4 ctrl + click on the little thumbnail). Hit the delete key two times then deselect. What this does is to make this set of white lines a little bit thinner. You can go lower on the blur but you will end up with a lot of layers and that will mess up the clouds that we do later as there will be far too many of them. You can go higher on the blur but then you'll end up with too few layers and therefore too few clouds. No blur at all and by the end you'll end up with white dots that won't go away.
6. Duplicate this layer and hide the layer beneath it like last time and repeat the steps. Keep repeating these steps until you run out of white lines and are left with nothing. You should end up with six or seven layers of white lines.
7. Click back on the black layer and Filter - Render - Clouds.
8. Filter - Render - Difference Clouds.
9. Repeat step eight.
10. Click on the lowest layer of white lines then set the opacity of the layer to 75%. Hit ctrl + E to merge down. Do two more difference clouds by hitting ctrl + F two times. The important thing here is how the difference clouds interact with the edges of the white lines...you should immediately notice a line running around the edge.
11. Repeat step ten until all of your white lines layers have been merged into the difference clouds. This is pretty easy because all you're doing is hitting ctrl + E, then ctrl + F two times and repeating. You should have something similar to screen 3.
12. Now the tricky part, Filter - Render - Lighting Effects. Use the settings in screen 4.
13. What you get is something like screen 5.
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