Brynehall and the Barony of Northcliffe

[aeshnidae]

Oh! What a lovely individual style you have!

Further to ChickPea's suggestion about the halo around your text, here is just one of any number of different techniques you might try to make a slither of clear space around each letter and lift the labels out of the line work, without using a coloured halo at all - in other words an invisible halo that simply fades the line work around each letter to reveal the parchment instead:

1. Add a layer mask to all your line work layers (mountains, trees, coastline etc) - that's a mask that lets you paint the visibility on or of in black and white for that layer
2. Make an alpha mask of your text layer
3. Expand the alpha mask by a few pixels and feather it the same amount
4. Select the line work layers one by one and paint the layer mask (not the layer!) to make the line work invisible in a small halo around each letter of the text on that layer.

Thanks, Mouse! I am still a newbie in Photoshop (my wife is an amazing Photoshop expert, but for fine art portraiture so she doesn't always know how to help out with fantasy cartography). Thanks to everyone here, I've got a couple different options to fix that outer glow.