[Award Winner] My atlas style in PS

[Ascension]

I'm really beginning to hate Open Office. Now my file is corrupted beyond my patience to repair. Anyone with an old copy care to upload it here so that I can use that and then re-edit it?

[Dalakmar]

Hi all,

I'm trying to follow this excellent tutorial using Photoshop 7 and am becoming very frustrated - mostly with my lack of knowledge of Photoshop. So I was wondering, has anyone else out there with Photoshop 7, who knows what they are doing, followed this tutorial? Fancy giving an old geezer a hand by telling him the equivalent steps in Photoshop 7?

I shall struggle on for now because the maps look so good I just have to make one or two or . . .

Dal.

[Ascension]

The main thing that 7 does not have is the hard mix layer blending mode. You'll have to do Image-adjustments-threshhold or Image-adjustments-brightness/contrast for the "base" layer at the beginning.

[Dalakmar]

Hi Ascension,

Thank-you for the taking the time to reply. As I said in my earlier post I'm not that HOT on photoshop, but your post has nudged me in the right direction. However, (you knew there was an however coming didn't you) I'm now stuck on this part:

Click back on the “Ocean” layer (on the layers palette). Grab a big airbrush and at the top of the screen reduce the flow to 10%. I start with the 300-pixel airbrush and work my way down as needed. Use black to define the ocean and white to define the land.

How can I do this. I'm on the Ocean's layer - which is beneath the Base layer, right? Either I'm missing something or I'm really stupid. I'd probably have to go with the second option - can you offer any advice.

Dal.

[Ascension]

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.

[Horzamonk]

Here you go. Thanks again for this great tut.

[Tyr]

Step 21 is where I seem to get really lost. No colours add at all. How do you even get into selecting colours with hex codes? I just have to use the standard sliders all the time.
Think I should try and figure out less complex photoshop stuff before this.

[Ascension]

Ok, this is pretty easy but if you've very little experience with Photoshop then I'll go through the Color Picker. The pic shows the screen and I'll go through what the various letters mean.

HSB stands for Hue, Saturation, and Brightness. This is one way to pick a color.

RGB stands for Red, Green, and Blue. This is another way to pick colors and is the one I use.

Lab stands for Lightness, color a, and color b. This one is difficult for me to work with so I never use it. It's supposed to mimic human vision by mixing two colors and then adjusting the lightness of the mix.

CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK. This is another way to pick colors, mostly use in print media.

#000000 stands for the hex code value...a number that has been assigned to the various billions of colors...00000 being black, FFFFFF is white, FF0000 is red, etc etc.

In my tuts I give you the RGB numbers, so just type those in next to the respective letter. I also give the hex code and you can just copy/paste that in.

If you cannot add any color whatsoever then you might be in grayscale mode so at the top of the screen click on Image-Mode and make sure that you are in RGB mode.

[Dalakmar]

Hi Ascension,

Just wanted to say thanks for all your support. I'll have to wait until the weekend again before I can give it another stab though.

Again . . . many thanks.

Dal.

[Mror]

Hi everyone! Congratulations for the guide its helping me a lot but im having some troubles. I dont know nothing about PS and i cant speak english very good, so im going to write what i`ve made step by step... sorry about this.

1. I create the document with your specifications.
2. I aply the clouds. (Background)
3. I duplicate that layer. (Ocean)
4. I create a new layer and fill 50% gray. The layer turns to gray, aply Hard Mix (the cow effect) and i rename it Base.
5. In the ocean layer, with the apropiate brush i draw the land.
6. Copy the ocean layer. (Ocean copy). I link the ocean copy and the base layers and i combine them.
7. I go to color range, set fuzziness to 200 (ive ticked the selection circle). I delete it, deselect and hide the base.
8. I copy the ocean layer (Rename Hills). In hills i put render, difference clouds. i hit CTRL+ F. Copy this and rename it mountains.
9. Hide mountains, add noise to hills. Aply the lighting effects both hill and mountains layers.
10. Hide hills, i copy the ocean layer (Land). I hit ctrl+f to repeat the efects.
11. I have the six layers in order, but its still plane! I add the colours just like in the tutorial, but its plane. no elevations.

Its like the seven step pic, but with colour. Its suposed to add colour after you get the elevations right?

Later im going to update an image, it doesent load right now.
Thanks a lot for your time!