How's that old saying go?
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again?
Well, I didn't quite succeed. I'm afraid my ancient version of PSP just wasn't up to the task I was trying to push on it. The big problem, I think, wasn't in PSP's abilities as much as it was in the fact that the more I developed, the more manufactured things started to look. Thus, I was faced with a decision.
On the one hand, I could try to put the map together in GIMP. The problem there is that I really haven't taken (or even had) the time to learn what GIMP can do. On the other hand, I could fall back on Terragen. The benefit in TG was that I would be able to work with a more natural looking elevation model. In the end, TG seemed to be the best way to go.
So now, after a couple hours worth of work (and probably several to go) I've gotten off to a better start than before after several hours worth of work in PSP. For the most part, I wanted to get my coastal areas set up. It took a bit of experimenting when it came to smoothing things out along the coast, but I managed it with a little flood filling at a low opacity and a gradually increasing area of effect. I haven't laid out the main rivers yet, and I'm sure that's going to be a bit of a pain as I will have to cut down some of the elevations surrounding them, but things are progressing much quicker than before.
So for this update, there are actually three images. The first is the elevation model after editing in PSP. The second is TG's internal interpretation of that elevation model. The third is a low end render with full surface maps in place. I may need to do a little blurring (either gaussian or motion based) to smooth things out just a bit, but that is an experiment for another time. In the meantime, I'll be doing a full sized render so that I can get a better look at where the new rivers are likely to occur.
GW