Woodcut effect for the ocean

[Coyotemax]

I've been using this for my latest map (and a few others). I was asked while posting a WIP on my most recent map "how did you do that" so I promised to put up a step by step of the process. I know a lot of us use the techniques in here, but we don't seem to have a tutorial that's right here on the site for it.. (before you say yes we do, let me explain)

I want to say very clearly that this is based on the technique here:
Wood block stamp style water (S. John Ross' PS tutorial)(+in GIMP)
I checked the thread before posting this - the map linked in the first post (holycarp, freaking awesome) is there when you follow the link - but the link to the tutorial gets redirected and I can't find the tutorial anymore

So, instead of referencing that tutorial and mentioning my own tweaks as an addition, I'll include my entire process. Note that there's a lot of opportunity for fiddling to come up with your own look.
Note: This tutorial assumes the use of Photoshop - I originally worked with this technique in photoshop 7, and used it in CS3 and CS5. To make the wavy lines, this particular process makes use of the Eyecandy Jiggle filter - I have NOT been able to use it with CS5 as the filter is not compatible with 64bit (I only installed the 64 bit version, so it should likely work with cs5 32bit). There are likely other ways to get the wavy effect using various filters, though since I have Eyecandy still installed for my CS3, I did not put the work into developing alternatives.


Step 1: Draw out your land shapes. I highly recommend putting the outlines on their own layer (I name it Land Outlines). Once I've drawn the outlines, I duplicate the layer and fill in the shapes so each island/continent is a solid colour. I name it Base Land Shapes. Select your land shapes from Base Land Shapes. I do this by Ctrl-Clicking the thumbnail on the layer palette
01.jpg

Step 2: Expand the selection 100 px (you can use less or more depending on the look you're going for - but remember this number for the next step)
02.jpg

Step 3: Feather the selection by 100px or whatever number you used in step 2. If you want to get really wacky, you can start messing around with different values for each.
03.jpg

Step 4: Create a new layer, I usually just call it Grey. Fill your selection on this layer with the paint bucket using a medium grey colour. Note that the darker you go, the heavier the lines will be later on, lighter grey will give you more sparse lines. You could even experiment with gradient fills.
04.jpg

Step 5: Right click on the layer in the layer palette, and duplicate the layer - in the requester box that pops up you want to tell it to go into a New file - to do that, where it has the filename, drop down the arrow to say New (there will be a lit of currently open documents).
15.jpg



Continued in next post due to image count per post limitations.

[Coyotemax]

Step 6 - if you already have a pattern of evenly spaced hand drawn lines, awesome! if not, you can make one. Without going into a full tutorial, create a new document, make sure it's square (256x256 should be plenty for most purposes, though you can double it if you REALLY want to avoid possible tiling). Draw lines straight across (just freehand them for the best look, play with jitter and scatter if you want to hold shift to draw them out straight) every 5 or 10 pixels, mess around to make it seamless, and you're good. If you're not up for that, you can cheat and use this as your pattern (512x512)
linepattern.png

Step 6.5 - Now the fun part. Change mode to Bitmap and mess with the settings. I find I have to convert to greyscale before I can convert to bitmap (if there's an easier way, I haven't found it yet). Go to your menu bar - Image/Mode/Greyscale (it will ask you to flatten, you can say yes, if you say no it will flatten when switching to bitmap mode anyhow). Now Image/Mode/Bitmap - and here's where the magic happens. Change your DPI to double your current value. I usually work at 300 DPI so I switch to 600, if you left yourself at the screen default of 72, you would put in 144, etc. But wait! there's more! Under Method, tell it to use a custom pattern, and choose that nice set of lines that you set up earlier.
06.jpg

Step 7 - You should now have a rather large image of white background with a lot of straight choppy looking lines that dither off to nothingness at the ends. Awesome. It should look something like this...
09.jpg

Step 8 - Now for the second half of the magic - bringing this back into the original file. But wait, if you move it across as is, you'll have a layer that's 2x the size of your actual map, and if you shrink it now, you'll have a few minor headaches later on. So we'll work it over first. convert back to RGB with the menu, Image/Mode/RGB. Select the black with your magic wand tool - I turn off the antialiasing for this, and ensure Contiguous is turned OFF. Now that my black is selected, I copy that to a new layer. Then I resize the image - the quick and dirty way to do this is just use the DPI value, put in the same DPI of the original file (300, or 72, or whatever you started with). This will shrink it to 50% and match your original file again.
08.jpg

Step 9 - Duplicate your layer, and move it back to the original file. Move the new layer so it is underneath your land outline layer. It should look like this, if you left your land shape layer as white:
11.jpg
If you don't want to use your Land Shape layer, you could also select the land shape layer (ctrl click the thumbnail) and put a mask over the wavy line layer.

Continued in next post due to image count per post limitations.

[Coyotemax]

Now we could easily leave it right there, that's the basic technique from the original tutorial (or at least as best I can remember it since I don't refer back to it anymore.. there may be some things that are done differently).

The wavy lines got a lot of good feedback though, so here's how I did that part.

With the woodcut layer selected, I opened the Eyecandy Jiggle filter and used the following settings:
14.jpg
Bubble value - 999
Warp 29
Twist 50
Movement: Brownian

You could of course play with the settings to your liking. The lower the bubble value, the more distorted they get (seems counter-intuitive, but there you go)

Those particular settings give the following look, at 100% and 50% (which I think looks wonderful)
12.jpg13.jpg


If you set the lines to multiply in the layer effects, it works out rather nicely - especially if you go over the colour and change it to a nice medium or dark brown instead of the black.
How do I do that? Lock the transparency in the layer palette, grab a really large brush (hard round 600 does wonders) and paint away.
16.jpg
Moutarde joins in at this point with the following helpful comment:
"Just as a helpful 'speed-it-up' tip, a quicker (and less destructive) way of changing the colour of a whole layer is to set the layer's fill to 0% [editor's note for those new to this aspect of photoshop - notice to the right of the red circle, there's a spot that says Fill 100% - change that to 0%], then give it a colour overlay [layer effect] of whatever colour you like. That way if you don't like your colour the next day, it's super easy to change it to something else "

[ravells]

Excellent tutorial, Coyote! Thanks for sharing the method and have some Rep!!!

[Ramah]

Looks great. Gonna have to give this a crack. Cheers CM.

[jbgibson]

An inline minitutorial on finding lost tutorials - in your thread just so's folks can find the abovereferenced Uresia woodcut wave tut.... mind you I am Really Really glad you couldn't find it at first, Coyotemax, since that drove you to show us your method :-).

1) Hit a disappeared link.
2) express disappointment
3) bring up http://www.archive.org
4) stick the vanished URL in the "wayback machine" search box
5) IF something comes up (they only TRY to archive the whole web - stuff gets missed), pick a likely date. Initial results are presented as a list of dates upon which the said page was crawled by their bot.
6) bask in the glow of past glories, reflecting on how transitory the web is (and ISN'T).

:-)

The St. Partick's Day 2008 crawl of the S. John's Uresia site seems complete for the needed page. The Archive.org bot must be impatient - it often skips images that I am guessing were slow to load.

The downside of this particular trick is that you may THINK all the copies of those embarrassing pictures from the office Christmas party were deleted from the web....

[moutarde]

Great stuff CM!

If you set the lines to multiply in the layer effects, it works out rather nicely - especially if you go over the colour and change it to a nice medium or dark brown instead of the black.
How do I do that? Lock the transparency in the layer palette, grab a really large brush (hard round 600 does wonders) and paint away.
16.jpg

Just as a helpful 'speed-it-up' tip, a quicker (and less destructive) way of changing the colour of a whole layer is to set the layer's fill to 0%, then give it a colour overlay of whatever colour you like. That way if you don't like your colour the next day, it's super easy to change it to something else

[Coyotemax]

jbgibson: ooh, AWESOME. I think it's time to grab that and archive it offline or make a PDF or something so it doesn't get lost again! I'd completely forgotten about the sites trying to archive the net. WayBackMachine is another one that comes back to mind now that you mention. Yoiks! [edit - now that I go there, i see it IS the waybackmachine. Hah!]

Moutarde: that's so incredibly easy I completely forgot.. I've added it to the tutorial, thanks. And no, you can't hide, I'm crediting you where it's due

[urxed]

I'm sorry for bringing up old threads, but what version of Eyecandy do you use? Is the latest version capable of doing this same thing? And is there any way of producing something similar only through PS own repertoire?

[Coyotemax]

this is what happens when i disappear for 6 months.
I'm sorry, I don't recall which version of eyecandy it was. And to be honest, the PC it was on got relegated to acting as a TV interface.. playing movies, recorded tv. mediacenter basically. When I did that, i uninstalled everything that wasn't necessary for the home theatre aspect, that included my copy of CS3 along with all the filters and plugins.

I don't have eyecandy on the laptop as I have the 64bit version of cs5 installed here and ec wasn't compatible

I recall having a lot of difficulty replicating the effect through the built in filters, which is why i reverted back to the jiggle. The Distort Filters were the ones I was mostly working with. I suspect having a good displacement map might be the key, then use the displace filter.