I made this map for Garwain on the Giant in the Playground forums, based on a map he provided. It was done entirely in Photoshop Elements 6. As you can probably see, it is mostly based on Ascension's atlas-style map tutorial, but it also uses ideas from Flawedspirit's realistic land/mountain texture tutorial and arsheesh's photo-realistic trees tutorial, as well as stuff I worked out on my own. Many, many thanks to Ascension, Flawedspirit, and arsheesh!

Melnor.jpg

While I'm quite happy with it for my first real attempt at this sort of mapping, I can definitely see some places to improve on in my next maps (shading on the mountains would probably help a lot; I'm not thrilled with the fonts and text colors, although I'm not quite sure what to do differently). Any other suggestions for things to work on in future maps would be appreciated