[Award Winner] My atlas style in PS

[Gidde]

Hey Rob, for some reason I'm getting an error when I try that link. Is it working for you?

[Gandwarf]

Hey Rob, for some reason I'm getting an error when I try that link. Is it working for you?

The link doesn't seem to work at the moment. Judging by the error I think it's temporary.

[smyrin]

The process will be a lil longer for you but here's what you need to do:
1. Filter-render-clouds to start with.
2. Duplicate this layer (will be named background copy).
3. Create a new layer.
4. Use the 300 soft round airbrush with 10% flow, use black and white, paint black to fill in some ocean and white to fill in some land. You don't need a whole lot, just go over these places once or twice.
5. When you have something that you like, hit ctrl+shift+E (this merges all visible layers and puts the final output on it's own layer while leaving the rest of the layers below intact).
6. Image-adjustments-brightness/contrast=set the contrast up to 100.
7. If you see places where you want to make some further adjustments, then delete the top layer and go back to the painting layer. When happy repeat steps 5 and 6.
8. When you finally get to something that you can live with, rename the contrast adjusted layer to "base" and rename the "background copy" layer to "ocean".
9. Proceed with the rest of the tut.

EDIT: I re-attached the re-edited version (in post #1) and I hope this one works.

Hey all, just found the site and am giving your tut a try. I am also using PS 7.0 and have had some difficulty following along. Couple of questions.

Question 1:
At step 5, you merge all the visible layers. Which layers should be visible at this point? When I complete this step all the layers are visible and I end up with just one. I don’t understand the “rest of the layers below intact” part.

Question 2:
Your tutorial is great but I don’t understand the why’s of doing something. If I could understand them, I would be better equipped to solve problems when I run into trouble. For example, rather than step 3-4 I could just select or create a copy of the clouds layer and then perform step 6 on it right away and I get the cow like pattern of black and white without having to use the airbrush on a new layer. What am I not getting?

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

[Ascension]

Ah, typo on step 5. It should be create a new layer and then hit ctrl + alt + shift + E. As for your other question, if you didn't like the results then you'd have to dump the layer and start over. By painting on an empty layer you never alter the clouds and if you don't like the results then you just add more black or white or erase a bit on the empty layer. You can do it your way, nothing wrong with that. Try it and see. By the way, the tut is not the Bible so you can edit and tweak things 'til your heart's content. There are many steps and many tools and filters so play around with all of them and see what you come up with.

[smyrin]

Thanks for the quick reply. I think the tutorial you wrote is an excellent tool and I heartily appreciate all the hard work you have done including answering the pestering questions of those following after you. You are genius, man!

Aside the accolades, I muddled through and managed to put something together once I understood what needed doing. I found a cool way of changing the gradient for different areas of the land mass which I will mess with.

I'm gonna try a few things and if I get something worthy of looking at, I will post. Thanks again for your work! By the way, do you have any other tutorials to look at? Is there a post somewhere that has links to ALL of them! I want more!!!

[Ascension]

I have a few other tuts in the Tuts section for different styles, some good some not so much (the forest one is pretty bad and the volcano one is confusing). I never got around to putting links to them in my signature like others have done. It would probably be handy if I did that but I sort of see it as shameless self-promotion...not that there's anything wrong with that

[smyrin]

My first attempt:

See attachment.

[smyrin]

Wow that came out too big! How do you do that attached thumbnail thing I see most posts have. Lemme know asap and I will edit the post and fix it!

Sorry....

[Steel General]

After clicking the "Edit" button, click on the "Go Advanced" button and use the file upload tool there.

[smyrin]

After clicking the "Edit" button, click on the "Go Advanced" button and use the file upload tool there.

Thanks a million!