Coastal Waves in Photoshop

[waldronate]

In my experience, the biggest problem with using an expanding selection is that the technique used for expansion quickly leads to the selection turning into hard edges at 45 degree angles. It just screams "look how computery I am!"

The outer glow technique, in contrast, uses a distance field that doesn't suffer from this sort of problem (see attached). It has limitations in the detail quality and size, but it can get nicely smoothed and antialiased coastal lines.

Coastal-Lines.jpg

I keep meaning to write a Photoshop plugin for the express purpose of doing this sort of thing, but it's always been way down on my list of priorities. In CC3+ from ProFantasy, I did write an edge filter that uses a 1D PNG texture to do the transparency and edge color (I also did a color key filter to fill everything on a layer with a color). The attached image shows a really ugly polychrome edge spectrum and the basic fill texture with the color keying things.

colorkey.gif