Lines around on photoshop

[vladi]

Hello! I'm having a trouble drawing thin lines around the coast of some of my maps and i want to know, is there a way to make it perfect with photoshop tools? Or is it just by drawing them? Cause I have some shaking in my hands and its hard for me to draw them one by one...
Thanks a lot!

[Kellerica]

Hiya!

There are a few ways to go about automated coastlines in PS, although none of them is quite the same than drawing them by hand. I do, however, have a method that works out reasonably well in my opinion.

How are your coastlines made? Do you have a separate layer mask for the landmass?

If you are working with a masked layer for a coastline, this is what I do:
- select the landmass by pressing down Ctrl (Windows) or Cmd (Mac) and then clicking on the layer thumbnail in the layer panel
- create a new empty layer on top of the landmass one
- select the new layer, and go to Edit > Stroke (stroke it with 1-2 pixel width, Outside or Inside of the selection can both work, matter of taste)
- when the stroke is made, use Ctrl+D to Deselect the landmass

This is the basic method. I use these additional steps that get me a pretty nice looking stroke when I don't have the time to do it by hand:
- select the stroke layer you just made (the same way you did with the landmass earlier)
- create a new layer
- with the Lasso or Marquee tool, right-click on anywhere in the working area. Pick Make work path... and set the Tolerance to something around 0,5-1,5.
- go to the Paths panel
- right click on the Work Path you just made, and select Fill.

Now you should have a coastline, that is a bit uneven to give it more of a hand-drawn feeling. You can merge the two line layers into one.

This only works if you have a relatively cleanly made landmass layer/mask, however. So not knowing how you have made your coastlines, I don't know if this helps you or not. If not, maybe include some screen caps of what your layers look like and I can try to help you further.

[waldronate]

If you're looking for a stroke at a set distance around your coastline, one way is to duplicate your land, select it, then expand that selection, fill with a color, and use a stroke layer style with 0% fill. It will unfortunately look a little polygonal around the edges. One way around that polygonal appearance is to feather the selection after expanding it, then select it again with the magic wand tool (or color select) after the initial fill and fill it again to harden up the more rounded edges.

A simpler way is to use the stroke layer effect directly on the original land mass, set the Fill Type to Gradient, the style to Shape Burst, and then pick a gradient that's striped (or make your own). That way, you can get as many lines as you want directly from the gradient.

[vladi]

Thank you two very much, guys! Those are some awesome tips!