Looks like a nice place to build...

[su_liam]

More messing around with photoshop. I decided to put Butch Curry's latest lesson on Dissolve into action for texturing. Dissolve is a lot more flexible than Add Noise. I also messed around in a very small scale with a Bevel and Emboss effect for trees. I like the tree effect, but I don't think it would work well in a smaller scale or lower resolution.

Also, I'm really appreciating layer masks. I changed the coastline twice, and my first attempt at a background color was to pinky-brown for my taste. Took no time at all to modify.

Okay, even the zip of this thing is too big to upload here. Waaah. I tried downsizing the image, but it didn't work.

[su_liam]

Well here's a full jpeg. Hopefully, this will give you an idea of what I'm trying to do.

[pyrandon]

Intriguing! Well done!

[GlennZilla]

I would agree with your comments about Dissolve and using layer masks. Dissolve is great for "roughing up" an area and making it look natural. I'll have to look at how Butch uses it.

The layer masks is in effect saying, "There's grass here, and here and it's kinda spotty over here." Then you can simply change it later by changing the grass to a different color without having to do it all again.

Also you can CTRL-CLICK on a layer mask and select the entire area it reveals. This is handy of you want to put a lighter shade of water around your landmasses.

[su_liam]

I wish the forest texturing was more scalable. This is an 8-in x 8-in 300dpi image of a fairly small area. You could, I guess, do a world map like this, but it would be immense.

I played a bit more. I added a layer under the land layer, but above the ocean which I called, "shore". I used the Clouds filter to apply a mottled texture to the new layer in lighter blues than the original ocean. To this I added a black layer mask. On the mask, I painted around the boundaries of the land with a scattered textured brush. I found my seashore effect to be a little too pointillistic so I used a bit of gaussian blur. Nice. I went back over that to increase the opacity a bit; this also gave some interesting watery highlights, which I liked a lot. I went back and softly added some wave effects to the water with the same brush.

After all this work on the water(probably about ten minutes if I'd known what I was doing), the land was looking a bit dull so I added a very subtle textured bevel and emboss to the mud layer(about 17% opacity on the highlights, 14% on the shadows). I really need to get back to heightfield manipulation, but I'm having so much fun with good old slow layer effects.

Still loving my wacom pad!

[pyrandon]

That water is looking very, very nice. Perhaps a bit bright--it pulls my eye from the land richness and detail, but I wouldn't douse it too much because it adds so much interest to the blue! Great job.

[ravells]

It's a really nice effect with the water, it suggests to me surf beating against the shore, very, very nice!