[Award Winner] My atlas style in PS

[Ascension]

Well the easiest thing to do is use a lasso tool, wrangle up a nice chunk of mountains from somewhere, and then move them where you want them. If Gimp supports a fuzziness then the edges will not be cut hard, if it doesn't have fuzziness support then I'd use a very low opacity eraser (around 5%) and erase around the edges until it blends seamlessly.

[arsheesh]

Hey guys, I just posted this in response to Geoff's quarry on his Westerlands WIP post, but I have an idea for a possible way to manually arrange mountains that might be slightly more hassle free. Instead of waiting till after mountain completion (step 20 in Gidde's pdf) to erase/move the already finished mountains, why not simply move the mountain cloud patterns themselves (this step would take place in-between 15a. and 15b. of the Gidde pdf, I'm not sure which step it would occur in within Ascension's tutorial) to where you want the mountain ranges to be. If you do this it would save you from having to do as much "touch up" detail after the fact, since all of the subsequent steps in mountain creation would simply work with the newly arranged clouds patterns. Well, just a thought.

Cheers,

-Arsheesh

[Ascension]

It's a thought but in the PS version that might take longer, maybe not, shrug. I find it easier to use a feathered lasso and move mtns around much easier than moving grayscale clouds around. Also, moving the grayscale clouds around would create empty places that would have to be airbrushed in with a layer underneath so the the spot is totally filled. This is all PS specific so I'm not sure how this would work in Gimp.

[geoff_nunn]

Hey,

I tried to comment earlier, but apparently it didn't show up. First off, Ascension and Gidde, thanks for the awesome tutorials. I made sure to throw you both some rep.

I used the lasso technique on the WIP map that Arsheesh linked to above. It worked fairly well, but there were a couple issues.
1. dragging the mountains around caused them to become out of sync with the hills layer. Gidde's technique uses the same cloud layer to generate both the hills and mountains. When you don't have to hand place them, this has the result of automatically creating foothills around all of the mountains, in addition to some other scattered hills.

When I manually adjusted the mountain layer, it pulled this lovely effect all out of sync. Unfortunately, if I had waited and flattened the hills and mountains into a single layer before doing anything, I would have wound up with little green foothills in the middle of my mountain ranges wherever I had to paste the mountains into place.

2. Dragging them also caused some of them to float over some of the lakes on my map... Again, when I was physically placing them.

I think I'm going to have another go at this using a hybrid between the random technique in the above-mentioned tutorials and the layer sandwich technique Rob A uses in his Artistic Regional Map Tutorial.

[Ascension]

If you keep a basic black and white shape for your continent on it's own layer or in a channel then you can use that as a mask and never have stuff in the water. Man-handling mtns into the right place will create those hard edge lines if your lasso tool does not have a feather or fuzzy feature. To fix that you may have to use a low opacity eraser (5%) to blend them in.

[geoff_nunn]

I had the lasso set to a 25px feather on the edges.

[hohum]

I thank my lucky stars for coming back to this thread and reading it through. Thanks to Ascension for sharing his style, Gidde for converting it to GIMP and arsheesh for proving to me that the kind of map I was wanting to do could be done. I had given up on my project as unattainable, but now I have hope.

I sincerely hope that Gidde's PDF and zip pack (containing the gradient and palette) will be included in the first post and in the PDF section. I found it difficult to locate.

I would like to add that I found it easier to use a large feathered brush to get the desired effect in steps #1e and #20b. I think I under erased the mountains and that may have contributed to my issues with hills. I also felt like I was having difficulty with selecting the hills by color after it had had the noise filter added. @arsheesh: Did you raise the hills level when you used it as forest?

I also struggled with the lack of screen shots for some of the selection and creation steps with the hills and mountains. So my advice is just follow the tutorial, the mountains don't look right until step #18, and then bang!

I will also re-iterate that in step #34a where it says use the colors from #22 is a typo. Use the colors from the previous step.

The only other typo I've found is #40e, it should be Threshold 15 (not 150).

I still need to jazz up/ bevel the rivers or something and I skipped the Nation and labeling part for now. Except for the hills I am fairly happy with the result.

Thanks again.

P.S. Ascension, Gidde and arsheesh all repped.

[arsheesh]

Nice job Hohum! To answer your question, I do not recall raising the hills layer itself. I added two Hill (i.e. "tree") color layers above the hills layer and set them each to soft light. Since making my original map I have worked on developing a more controlled method for getting trees exactly where you want them. If you are interested in the details I can send you a beta-test version of a tut I've created that outlines the process (just send me a private message with your email address and I'll send you the pdf).

Cheers,
-Arsheesh

[Aenigma]

Hey. I've been trying this tut out now in Ps CS4. After several attempts I've made it to step 21 and now I'm stuck.
I simply cannot select>inverse. It says "warning: no pixels were selected"

Also: Why does it say at 8: "Click back on the “ocean” layer (on the layers palette) and duplicate it." and then at 10: "When happy, duplicate this layer (it will be named “ocean copy”)" ?
When I do this, I end up with "ocean copy 2" and thus I still have an ocean layer and an ocean layer copy when I've linked one of the ocean copies (I did it with ocean copy 2) and the base layer together.

I'd be glad for any assistance.

Thanks in advance.

[Ascension]

I think I know what happened but I need a screenshot to be sure. Make sure the layers palette is visible. My guess is that you have not deleted the black on the "base" layer but I want the screenshot to be sure.