Reply With QuoteI think your sand looks great. If you want to fiddle with it then, on a new layer, airbrush in some yellows and oranges and play around with the blend modes or use yellow and orange clouds. But I like it as is.
Ok, so to get a nice style contrast I started this one based entirely on the gimp translation i did of ascension's atlas tut. I think I managed to get the mountains in the right place after much wrangling, but the colors are driving me crazy. No matter what I do, the desert either blinds me or is grey.
I'm thinking that tomorrow I'll start trying to put the mountains from this version onto the color base from the first version and see how that looks. If I darken it a bunch and put some land contours on, maybe I can still get away with no forests atlas-style
I think your sand looks great. If you want to fiddle with it then, on a new layer, airbrush in some yellows and oranges and play around with the blend modes or use yellow and orange clouds. But I like it as is.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
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I'll second that. Nice desert colors as is.
The desert colours are great, I'd be happy with that.
If anything, the mountains in the desert area look a tiny bit washed out to me along the subtle edges, almost like they're being viewed through a cloud or mist layer. Not sure how to fix that, maybe a tiny bit of sharpening?
Colourwise it's great though.
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I agree with both the colours and with CM. I think it's a great colour but to me the mountains in the desert would maybe still rise up to be a stone colour? From this distance would they look like sandstone rocks? I guess they'd get blown with sand but... heh... I dunno. I'd try changing the colour on those mountains first I think.
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The problem with the mountains is that, according to the tut, the layer needs to be set to hard light while the color overlay needs to be set to soft light. That way you get the separation needed to make it look like the mtns are above the terrain.
If the radiance of a thousand suns was to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...I am become Death, the Shatterer of worlds.
-J. Robert Oppenheimer (father of the atom bomb) alluding to The Bhagavad Gita (Chapter 11, Verse 32)
My Maps ~ My Brushes ~ My Tutorials ~ My Challenge Maps
Nice maps
Really good stuff here. I like all three versions in this thread, and each one has certain elements that work beautifully. It's interesting to see the same land realized three different ways by the same mapmaker. Every aspect of your latest effort looks great at full zoom, but I actually like the previous version better in the zoomed-out view. When viewed zoomed out, the new version's mountain ranges start to look a bit too random and disintegrated, and the cloud filter is a little too obvious, in my opinion. Impressive, though, how you have done it using a tutorial that was written for a completely different program.
The second version of the map has a great palette and awesome-looking oceans. I love the river channels, too. And even the earliest style has a lot to recommend it--I particularly like the forest texture (something I've recently worked a great deal on, myself). Overall, I think version #2 works best for a full-continent map*, and version #3 would make some outstanding regional/smaller-scale maps.
*At least so far...feel free to prove me wrong!
Looking pretty good so far.
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Thanks so much for all of the comments and suggestions, everyone. I didn't end up getting to work on this at all yesterday, so I'm looking at it with some fresher eyes. First and foremost, it's apparent from the comments that the desert color isn't blinding to everyone, so I'm going to have to adjust my monitor. It was literally hurting my eyes, it was so light and bright.
@CM and Ramah regarding the desert mountains: Agreed. I actually managed to sharpen up and darken the mountains a bit while I was endlessly trial-and-erroring the other day, but that didn't make it into the posted version. I'm pretty confident I can fix that issue though.
@Ascension: You're right, but the coloring in gimp doesn't work the same way, and I'm still feeling out the differences and the whys. Tonight I'm going to play more with the plugin RobA turned me onto, that does color overlays etc. in a closer way to PS, and see if that helps a bit.
@Scott: Thanks for the detailed comments! I actually agree with most of what you said regarding #2 and #3. There are parts I like of each of them that I'd really like to combine. Thanks for the compliments on the forests as well; I've actually been thinking of doing a tutorial on those (actually it would be on the forests from the middle earth map, since they take these ones and improve upon them a bit). Maybe I should throw that together while I'm dithering over how to render this map
Ok, after days of grabbing pieces of mountains and fitting them in place like a jigsaw puzzle, I think I'm happy with this. I had been trying to blend styles a little more into something that didn't look quite so obviously like it was copying Asc's atlas style, but my skill level doesn't seem to be there quite yet, lol. So I ended up essentially with the atlas style, but I kept the ocean hybrid from the previous version, and the cut-in rivers, and modified the color palette a bit.
On to placing borders, cities, etc., but C&C are always appreciated and I'm not getting rid of my layers, so I can make adjustments as needed.
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