world creation in photoshop help where to start

[Jaekaido]

hello Cartographers,
my name is Jaekaido and i am new to making maps while i can reproduce maps based on tutorials none of the maps i make look right to me. i have seen several maps here on the forums and must say i want to make maps like them. particularly the town and city maps. i am looking to create naturall medieval towns and cities, but am wanting to start at the world level first as the terrain is going to help my process of world building for D&D. i am trying to figure out what dimensions the earth is cos my world is earth sized and functions very similar, though time is different as my game is base purely of of 7's. Anyway, for a 2d map of an earth sized world what should the dimensions be as i want to have detailed mountains and rivers along with islands, continents and even plate tectonics. my problem is that i dont know where to start i though that if i started with the plate tectonics that would lead me to the continents which lead to mountains, canyons, volcanoes, and islands. i will be running a series of games in this world all from different campaign settings that exist in the world. i use Photoshop cs3, and have a good understanding on most of the features. so for my first couple of questions.

1 how tall and how wide should an earth like planet be?
2 are there any easy ways to create natural looking plates in Photoshop?

[Azélor]

The scale of the map is entirely up to you.
Look at these two maps for example, they represent countries of similar size but different scale:

https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...0&d=1461179077
https://www.cartographersguild.com/a...0&d=1503031175

While the first map has a nice style too, it doesn't look big.
On the other hand, the second map depicts something that looks bigger because it is more details.
That's my map and I'm pretty sure it took a hell lot longer to finish.
That is the main drawback. Lot of details take time and you end up with larger files. That could be a problem if your computer can't handle them.

But if you ask about the dimensions of the Earth, rounded numbers
510 000 km2
40 000 km of circumference at the equator
10 000 km from pole to equator.

[Jaekaido]

okay thank you. that means for my purposes it would be 4,000 wide x 2,000 tall that makes me very happy. thank you so much now all i need to figure out is how to make jittery lines in Photoshop.

[Azélor]

¸I'm not sure what you mean. Unless you are a robot, the lines are never going to be perfectly straight when drawing/using a mouse.

[Jaekaido]

Right but i would like lines that are jittery so that it makes a variation in the edge of the Tectonic Plates once i figure out how to draw them in Photoshop. i use a mouse currently as i cant afford a tablet much less know how to use one.

got any suggestions?

[Jaekaido]

Where would i Post a Work in progress thread. i have just started using this site and have no clue where to post things

[Azélor]

Right but i would like lines that are jittery so that it makes a variation in the edge of the Tectonic Plates once i figure out how to draw them in Photoshop. i use a mouse currently as i cant afford a tablet much less know how to use one.

got any suggestions?

You mean something like that?: http://dboudeau.fr/site/wp-content/u...nsformante.jpg


Assuming it's a world map it would belong here: https://www.cartographersguild.com/f...splay.php?f=38

[Revock]

look at autorealm, it's free and it's fractal shape tools look great, you could draw your shapes for landmasses there in black and white, then export as a .bmp and import into photoshop or gimp for further work on the map.