Trouble with mountains in Saderan tutorial

[quicksilver]

i found that using small strokes and often just single clicks with small, low opacity brushes worked the best. Also switching back and forth between black and white in the layer mask, so sometimes you are building up and then taking away. For instance, attacking some of those terraces with a black spatter brush with around 15% opacity might rough them up a little more. If you're using a round brush, make sure the hardness is set to zero as well. It's hard to tell but I think that at the stage you're at there, that's just the base elevations. Adding the rest of the steps will help give the mountains more definition and texture. You can also go back into any of the layer masks and adjust them until they look the way you want them too. My only other suggestion would be to play around with the highlight and shadow values in the bevel and emboss layer styles. I darkened up the shadow opacity on most of settings he suggested.

I'm still learning as well but this is the most recent Saderan map I made, if it helps.. I used round brushes initially and then went back over every mask with a spatter brush to rough them up.