Hello Out There,

My friends and I have recently decided to try and play Dungeons and Dragons. I am going to be the Dungeon Master. As such my creativity in terms of the world has really blossomed. I have a general sketch of what I want the world to look like on some engineering paper. I have since discovered this site and, more importantly, Ascensions tutorial. When I saw his tutorial I instantly wanted to try and create this map myself. I have downloaded a trial version of adobe photoshop to follow along with the tutorial (I have 30 days to learn everything! haha). So, as it turns out, I clearly do not have the background in order to clearly understand all of the steps to know why things are done to gain the desired effect so I am at a loss as what I do is not what is done in the tutorial.

My basic problems seem to be:
1: the land effect is too mountainous
2: because of [Problem 1] my mountains aren't very noticable.
3: Everything is fairly dark (I sometimes seem to be able to remedy this, tho I don't really know what I change)
4: Photoshop is completely different than any program I've every used (Well, I use autocad, so I get layers) so... that doesn't help my situation...

The tutorial, to me, is very basic and straight forward. Seems perfect for someone with no experience with the software. As such I feel like I get fairly close to the desired final product, but fall just short somewhere.

My hope is, someone to follow my steps and tell me where I slip up so I can create a great looking map. I have provided screen shots along each step to (hopefully) compare.

thanks everyone! I'm very excited I found this site and discovered the fun (and sometimes frustrating) of map making!


step 11


step 12 start


step 12 mid


step 12 ctrl f


step 16


step 18


step 19


step 21


step 25


step 31

This is where it is clear that something went very wrong. I'm sorry for how general everything is :/ I'll continue to work with photoshop and hopefully figure it out myself. I just thought I'd get input from the collective.

Thanks in advance,
Crazybob