The Avlor and Ghostrock Photoshop Thing

I’ve been tinkering with creating “worlds” off and on since I reviewed the tut on making a simple globe. Here’s how I created my latest world. (Click image thumbnail for full view.)

Start by looking at satellite images of earth:

• The places I’ve been roughly referencing my colors and textures/shapes from from are the Landsat 7 Image Archive, Earth View, and Earth from Space. For clouds I’ve been looking at the NOAA site, particularly the GOES images like this one. (Can you tell I miss working with satellite data some days? Sigh…)

Note: Save often. (This is a long tutorial.)

Background:

1. New image, background should be black. (In my case here I’ve done 800 x 800). (Name it black sky.) (My resolution was 150 - it may matter for some effects.)

Water:

• New group - water, under the land group.
• New layer - water. Fill it with blue. (I used 1f04bf.)
• Dupe water layer. Name it water texture. Hide the original water layer. Filter->Noise->Add Noise (5).
• Filter->sketch->Bas Relief (5,11 bottom left)

• Right click on the Create New Fill or Adjustment Layer icon, choose Gradient Map. Choose a white to blue gradient (I chose the white, blue, black “matte sphere” gradient), so that the blue is in the bottom left.

• If you don’t have this particular gradient handy here’s the details on it, so you can reproduce it if you wish. White (f3eeeb) on one end,black (020725) on the other and the blue (012c9d) at location 51.

• Set the water texture layer to screen blend mode, and un-hide the water layer. The water doesn’t have any areas now that are completely white.

Land:

• New group - Land.
• New layer (name it landmass clouds). Reset the colors to black and white. Filter->Render->Clouds.
• Curves adjustment layer to get better contrast - I’ll note what I had here for the curves, but always do what you think works best for the effect when curves are involved in any step. (I scooted black to the right for 140, 0. Added a dot in the middle and moved it to 182, 188.) This made for a lot of black areas (which will be water). (Name this layer water curve.)

• Dupe the two layers and merge them. (Name it water is black.)
• Dupe this layer. (Name it land masses) Perform Filter->Sketch->Bas relief (10,3 bottom left) and Filter->Sharpen->Sharpen More.

• On water is black layer, wand select the black areas (non contiguous, tolerance of 3.)

• Selection->Modify->Contract by 1 pixel. Selection->Feather by 1 pixel.
• Invert the selection (CTRL SHIFT I). On the landmasses layer, click Add Layer/Vector Mask. (This is so we can easily add our own light source for the water. The current one looks weird on a round surface.)

• Hide the other layers in this group.

Vegetation:

• New group in the land group - vegetation.
• New layer (in the land group). (Name it veggie clouds.) Filter->Render->Clouds.
• Click on the Create New Fill or Adjustment Layer->Gradient Map. (Name the layer veggie colors.)
• Use a Brown and green gradient map that looks as realistic as you can get it. I created mine from the visible earth map. (I saved it in a file here - if you don’t want to create your own.)

• Add a mask to this layer, and copy (Alt then drag) the one from landmasses.
• Dupe the veggie clouds and veggie colors layers, and merge the two new layers. Name it vegetation.
• Reduce the opacity to 75% to see the mountains underneath. If you have your water layer turned on - then it should look like this.