[Award Winner] My atlas style in PS

[Vandy]

Hello, All.

Here is Ascension's wonderful tutorial repackaged as a PDF document.

Enjoy.

Regards,

Gary


Making an Atlas Style Map in Photoshop.pdf

[Ascension]

Thanks, V. Glad you're doing this, it's very helpful.

[Sirith]

Hmm, I have a very hard time following the tutorial. I seem to be doing fine, but when I get to the picture at step 22, it looks absolutely nothing like what Ascensions tutorial shows (see attachment). I figure it might already be going wrong at step 11, but I'm not sure. I like the tutorial, I just can't seem to get it right :/
Is there a crucial step or detail I might be missing?

(Also, ignore the weird island-shape, I'm just trying to figure out how it works )


EDIT: Alright I seem to have found my problem. When you start to add colour, I first selected the base layer, so all further layer styles were applied to that layer, instead of to the land layer.


EDIT 2: Another try. I'm not very fond of the outcome, there are some areas definitely needing improvement. However, I can see myself using some of these techniques on future maps, especially to throw in some texturing on my (normally) handdrawn and -painted maps.
Thank you for the tutorial, Ascension

[Ascension]

Sorry I couldn't get back to ya sooner there Sirith, I work at my biz every day, half days on weekends, so I am usually indisposed until the afternoons/evenings. I'm glad you were able to mend it and if you have any further questions just ask

[Kasonic]

Hate to dig this up and bother you, but I'm screwing up somewhere around step 19 in your tutorial.

(First time poster, total PS newbie, I found this thread through another site; great tutorial and method!)

It says to apply the same lighting effects to the hill and land layer...well, when I do this, I get an image that's WAY darker than your example, or anyone else's. The color is correct without the lighting render, but then the texture obviously wrong.

What's the newbie doing wrong?

[Ascension]

So far I don't see anything off except that red dot in the south ocean. I'll have to double check my color hex codes to see if I messed that up (will do that when I get home tonight) but you can always just change them to suit ya cuz we all have different monitor settings. So far so good really.

[Kasonic]

Yeah I didn't bother fixing the dot from a misclick, won't hurt in the end. Thanks; looks like a simple Soft Light filter gets things more in line with what I'm seeing anyway.

[Meloncat]

Ascension, I wanted to give thanks for your amazing tutorial. It seems almost criminal to let even the layman like myself be capable of producing a map of this caliber. I can finally get started on my fiction, so I owe you immense thanks!

About the only problem I came into was with the whole erasing mountains part. I had it as specified (20% flow, 300 px brush), and when I tried to erase the mountains I ended up with rather obvious eraser circles. I think it's merely my own noviceness with Photoshop though, playing with the flow down to 10% and adjusting the opacity gave me what I feel like are better results. Do you know if there's any way we can better direct the 'spawning' of mountains in the preliminary stages, rather than rely on their random emergence? Might be more authentic to geographics that mountains go where they please, but I need to establish some mountain chains in my map, and I'm not sure that randomization will suffice. A more specific question is: At what stage could I begin to tweak how Mountains emerge, and what would I do to tweak them to be more/less plentiful, more in one area than another, ect.

I can clearly see why you won the award, and hope you're given all the more for your great efforts!

[verdilak]

EDIT: Alright I seem to have found my problem. When you start to add colour, I first selected the base layer, so all further layer styles were applied to that layer, instead of to the land layer.

I figured my problem out and it was this issue as well.

[verdilak]

I figured it out, thanks man!

Also, I tried to get your sat mountains tutorial to work but they didn't turn out very well, so I undid those changes to it.

continent.jpgcontinent1.jpg