Thread: [Award Winner] My atlas style in PS

Worked nicely, thanks. Just another small question. While creating the "land" layer from the ocean layer, u practically use a "plain clouds" layer with the "hill" lightning effects (the 5 omni lights). This leaves me with a far more black/whiste contrasted "land" layer than in screenshot no. 22. I have very dark and very bright spots. So i think, there might something be missing?!

Hmmm, might be that your monitor is set up differently than mine but no matter there's an easy fix. Just grab the large airbrush tool, turn the opacity down to 5-10% and paint over the lightest/darkest areas with black/white on the layer before running the lighting effects.

I am having an issue at Step 21 and 22. I Have just my land mass with my ocean gone (transparent white and grey boxes). The land mass has the gradient and everything. But when I look at the picture in Step 22, my land mass doesnt show the mountains and hills or anything, it is just a flat image. I've tried changing the order of the layers, but no go. Where might I have gone wrong?

Oh, and I am using CS5 is that makes any difference.

Gimme a full screenshot so that I can see your layer palette.

Here it is.

Now, I can bring my Mountains (which I have already done step 23 & 24 with) to the top and they will show through the base, but the rest of the layers completely overpower the base unless I lower the opacity. Could this just be that I am rushing the gun (in that I will be getting rid of the ocean in the hills and land layers in a later step)? I dunno, since it seems like in the Step 22 pic that you are showing the hills and land layers as well as the mountains layer through the base layer.

Originally Posted by Sirith

EDIT: Alright I seem to have found my problem. When you start to add colour, I first selected the base layer, so all further layer styles were applied to that layer, instead of to the land layer.

I figured my problem out and it was this issue as well.

I figured it out, thanks man!

Also, I tried to get your sat mountains tutorial to work but they didn't turn out very well, so I undid those changes to it.

Looks fine so far except for the river that goes to two oceans (just chop out the middle so that you get two rivers each going to a different ocean) and the lake that goes to two oceans (same thing). As to the mtns, the easiest thing to do is to just duplicate the mtns layer...it sort of beefs them up a bit.

Originally Posted by Ascension

Hmmm, might be that your monitor is set up differently than mine but no matter there's an easy fix. Just grab the large airbrush tool, turn the opacity down to 5-10% and paint over the lightest/darkest areas with black/white on the layer before running the lighting effects.

Mine is calibrated (Spyder 3, Adobe RGB) but that might be of course. The difference is enormous however, I will try. That you recommend i did on my first try (still with rugged coastlines), here it is:



It is and will remain unfinished, because of some issues I started over again. I think i'll need to some other "mountain" technique, they're not bad but don't make me too happy on the other hand. Of course, this is the best "regional map" i've created using photoshop.

BTW: What actually means "WIP"?