My quick lil tutlet on volcanoes and canyons

[Ascension]

I had promised a mini tutorial (I call it a tutlet) on how I do volcanoes, canyons, and broken lands (Mordor-like) and whether anyone wants it or not, here it is Give it a read and see what you think. It's a small file (for me) at 1.3 megs. The screenshot is at 300% zoom so of course it looks heavily pixellated.

[baelzemon_2200]

Always a pleasure to read a tutorial from you. I love the one this goes with, Im running through it now... But I dont get anything like your pictures. Mine looks still like the clouds just with a little more contrast, as opposed to the clear black and white of yours (refer: step 12-13). Am I doing something wrong? The only thing Im doing different is the resolution of mine, which I was doing at 4000 pixels/cm which turns to be 9999.999 when you change to dpi instead of dpc.
Any advice? Im using CS3 Photoshop

[jfrazierjr]

Always a pleasure to read a tutorial from you. I love the one this goes with, Im running through it now... But I dont get anything like your pictures. Mine looks still like the clouds just with a little more contrast, as opposed to the clear black and white of yours (refer: step 12-13). Am I doing something wrong? The only thing Im doing different is the resolution of mine, which I was doing at 4000 pixels/cm which turns to be 9999.999 when you change to dpi instead of dpc.
Any advice? Im using CS3 Photoshop

Can you post up the largest file you can upload so we can see what the results look like? That may be important to help point you in the right direction.

Joe

[baelzemon_2200]

Err... Cant post any atm, seeing as I have a slow connection right now. It looks EXACTLY like the cloud render, except that the colors are more defined. Its not just black and white, there are greys there as well.
I have tried 100dpi, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, 9000, 9999.999dpi - all with the same result. Nada.

[Ascension]

Are you referring to step 12-13 of the continent tutorial? I've tried to troubleshoot the process up to that point but can't figure anything out other than not pumping up the contrast to 100 (Image > adjustments > brightness/contrast). Don't touch the brightness, just the contrast.

[baelzemon_2200]

yes, thats what Im talking about. I try all levels of contrast, and I dont get anything like the result you get, mine just looks like the cloud render

[Ascension]

Huh, weird, well then my guess is 1 of 2 things...1) it's something about cs3 (I'm on plain ole cs) or 2) maybe your using the layer style blending option at the bottom where it says "underlying layer"...if you slide the bottom-most slider all the way up you lose the black ring and the layer looks exactly like the original cloud render. But at any rate I have a workaround you might try. Filter > artistic > cutout. Number of levels = 2, edge simplicity = 0, edge fidelity = anything. This will produce something like camouflage in 3 (or maybe 4) shades of gray, so use the select > color range to select one color then create a new layer and then fill it with white. Then rename that layer to "base". Another work around is Image > adjustments > levels = move the black slider to 127 and the white slider to 129 but this leaves a small 1 pixel gray ring around the continents which can easily be deleted.

[bryguy]

Been tryin to do this tutorial for a project of mine, but I keep running into problems with the crater...I draw it out, give it the save type of look as yours, but as soon as I merge it down and apply the Lighting Effects, everything looks different. Then when I go ahead and remove the black I run into some problems. My version looks very different by this point...

[Ascension]

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me because I get different results too I need to redo this and at least make it clearer but I also think that I forgot a step or a layer somewhere. Show me what ya got and I'll see if I can help ya come up with something usable.

[pickaboo]

Have a pdf, only 300kB. I'm going to test this one in a bit.