coastline waves tutorial

[rafaelrzacharias]

Can anyone help me with a tutorial, or some step-by-step on how to make this type of coastline waves?? I mean, which effects to use, etc..
It shouldn't be hard, I just don't have much practice with PS..
THX!

[Larb]

Not got much time to go into detail this minute, but how I usually do it is with just the sea selected, stroke the layer (use a new layer).
Then go to select -> modify -> contract (and pick say, 5 pixels or something. Then stroke the new selection on a new layer. Then contract it again, etc etc, repeating until you have as many as you want.

Then you delete the bits you didn't want stroked (it'll stroke the whole selection after all). Then you add gaussian blur to the layers.

I'm betting someone has a more efficient technique though. =P

[rafaelrzacharias]

Ok, thx! ^^ I'll try that later.
anyone else?

[Coyotemax]

Funny you should mention that, I was just going through today to look for one of my coastline tutorials for reminders on my current project.

I didn't end up using this technique, but you may find it useful:
http://www.cartographersguild.com/showthread.php?t=6630

It's not *that* different than the above mentioned method, but if you do more than 2 outlines using the previous mention, I find it starts to look artificial, the selections start getting straight lines in them. The gradient/stroke method will keep smooth lines for each ring. Then again, if you're doing a tech-advanced style map, the straight lines would be a very nifty effect

[waldronate]

Layer styles might work, specifically Bevel and Emboss. EDIT: but the one CoyoteMax shows works better.

[rafaelrzacharias]

Yeah, coyotemax's tutorial is good, well-explained.. I'll try through it later.
I enjoyed Tom's Voradin map style too, the waves he did looks awesome, specially for the map style I'm trying..
Is that a way to teach me that? Anyone knows how to do it?

[Ascension]

When using the contract selection method you get the straight lines eventually but a way to avoid that is to use noise - median of 2 or 3 and that will smooth things out.

[Locution]

It looks to me like a Ripple filter was added to the waves. But I could be wrong.

[mrrkyl]

I found this tutorial for creating similar coastlines on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGIwB...eature=channel


Added note: the tutorial covers 2 topics; the creation of the waves starts around 5:50