June Entry: Mennin's Hallow and environs

[Torq]

Very Cool Mid. I really love your forest texture. How did you achieve it?

Torq

[Midgardsormr]

I borrowed a technique described at cartotalk, conveniently linked here somewhere in the tutorials forum. It was a bit hazy on the details, so I'll go ahead and reconstruct what I did here, but at a reduced resolution for speed and storage purposes. Reducing the res will make the scaling of the forest change, I think.

Starting with the shaded relief map, as in pic #1 below, use a hard-edged black brush to paint in where you want tree cover (pic 2). The borders will be a bit too regular, so select that layer and save the selection to a new channel: Select>save selection. In the channels window, go to the new selection and run the spatter filter on it: filter>brush strokes>spatter (pic 3).

Load the selection, invert it, and delete it from the trees layer, resulting in pic 4. Now, the next part of the process requires changing the color space to greyscale, and since you obviously do not want to damage the image, select the layer, copy it, and paste it into a new greyscale image of identical resolution (pic 5).

[Midgardsormr]

In the new document, I set my colors to black and white and ran the Grain filter: filter>texture>grain. Settings were 100 intensity, 57 Contrast, and Soft Grain type. Since I am in greyscale mode, the normal multicolored effect of the grain filter does not occur. I can now switch back to RGB: Image>Mode>RGB.

I select the black areas of my forest with Select by Color and low fuzziness. I chose 5 this time around. Select, invert, and delete makes the texture.

A new layer gets filled with the green I want for the darker parts of the forest, and I place that layer beneath my texture (pic 1 below).

Bevel the texture layer with an inner bevel, soft chisel, depth to taste, and size higher than 6. Shading should match whatever you've been doing on your map--mine's from the southwest. Highlights should be a light green and shadows a dark green. (pic 2)

Flatten the image, select all, and copy it. Go back to the original image and paste.

Select your original trees layer and move the selection so it overlaps the new trees as neatly as possible (marquee tool set to new selection will allow you to do this). Invert the selection and delete the new layer. Move the new layer so it lines up with the old one, then turn off the old trees layer. You should have something that looks like pic 3.

Experiment with blending modes, brightness/contrast, and hue/saturation/lightness until the new trees blend in with your existing terrain nicely. I used Soft Light, adjusted brightness down and contrast up to get pic 4.

Use the dodge and burn tools to enhance the shaded relief (pic 5).