Create realistic Forests for regional Maps in Photoshop

[DonDozone]

Hi there, mol

Well, the the grassland texture is stitched together from satellite picture from NASA. They have the awesome Blue Marble project, where you can download picture of the whole earth with a resolution of up to 86,400 x 43,200 pixels. There you can find almost every type of terrain to copy. For the grasland i use mostly parts from central Africa & India. (Another link for these picture is the NASA Earthobservatory). The collection of NASA satellite images gives you a lot of inspiration. Just look through their collection and you'll see.

If you take a look around the collection of NASA satellite images, you can find many awesome textures you can use. I didn't make seamless textures, but in fact I took many small patches and copied them together. Here are some examples of terrains I used in some of my previous Maps:
terrains.jpg

In this particular case, I made some additional steps, so that the whole texture looks like it is in a bigger scale:
steps.jpg
1.: The plain texture stitched together from the satellite image
2.: Apply lighting and tweak the color.
3.: Add 2 layers on top, both with opacity 20% and mode "overlay". Apply the filter "Add noise" to the first one and "clouds" to the second.
4.: On top a pattern-layer with blending mode "multiply" and opacity 50%. The pattern I chose is under stone patterns and may be called something like "structured tile" and is just below the "light marmor" (sorry, I have the german PS, I don't know, what it is called in English).

Does that answer your question? If not, I can write a more detailed version

Cheers, Don.