[Award Winner] Making a continent in photoshop

[Blackmagicweaver]

It worked like a champ! Thanks so much, and sorry for being a pain. I love the style here, but mainly I want to do it to help familiarize me with the tools in PS a bit more.

[sarandosil]

I've been looking for a way to generate landmasses with general shapes but random edges forever, and your method is awesome.

You lost me on step 31 though. The ocean layer I have has the white landmass in it, and bringing it up and applying the lighting effect from the hills layer doesn't really do anything since I'm applying light on solid white. Did you mean for us to apply the same noise filter to it too, or did I mess up somewhere earlier?

Edit: I'm totally lost now. Your picture in step 39 looks like it had a cloud pattern on it and the image I ended up with doesn't. Also I'm assuming you didn't want us to delete the water in step 15? Because my ocean layer just has the landmass in it too, which step 41 doesn't do what you show it does.

[Ascension]

Your "ocean" layer should be exactly the same as the very first clouds render on the background layer...you might be mixing up the background copy layer and the base copy layer.

[sarandosil]

Ahh, I think I got confused when I was messing around with the original few steps, mea culpa. The pdf file posted on page 9 seems to have some different instructions on it, is that a more updated version?

I gotta run for now (*sob*) but when I get back I'll start over with the pdf file.

[Ascension]

The pdf is actually a few months older, the doc file is more recent as I had to clarify some things...everytime I say "copy this layer" what I really mean to say is "duplicate this layer". Reading thru it again it appears that I still have to fix some of those things.

[sarandosil]

Here's my attempt. Didn't bother trying to tweak it too much in the interest of time, hhe. I'll do that for the campaign map I'm working on.

[Ascension]

Looks like ya got it, nice

[umbrellatron]

I am a bit confused with step #34: what layer do I put the layer styles on? I put them on the base layer but that's causing me confusion in later steps. Also, it would be really helpful if you put screenshots of what your layer palette looks like because I think that's what would solve it for me.

[Ascension]

Yep, caught a typo...thanks Those layer styles go on the "land" layer, not the "base" layer.

[umbrellatron]

That makes more sense, thanks. It works much better now.