Unfortunately I'm not really familiar with Photoshop, otherwise I'd have written a PS compatible version of the tut. But like Ravs said, I'm sure a conversion wouldn't be too difficult (on the contrary, you could probably do quite a bit more with this in Photoshop). In fact, I just looked at 290Blue's latest WIP and it looks like he figured out how to convert the tutorial over to PS.

As for mismatched vs matching checkered neat-lines, I was offering that advice as more of an aesthetic preference than a recommendation based upon historically sound cartographic practice (e.g. for a historic counterexample check out this 1780 map of Italy). So calling the mismatched borders style a "mistake" was perhaps not quite fair, or accurate. If you like that style, go with it. Also, thanks again everyone for your feedback on this tutorial.

Cheers,
-Arsheesh