It does look better as it makes the rivers look narrower but the shading is a bit extreme considering the scale. The rivers you shaded look like gorges and it's gonna be pretty hard to make them not look like this I guess. Perhaps try lowering the opacity of the shadow/highlights layer by, say, 15-20 % tops just to se how it fares.
That or ... add another layer with the initial shading expanding further from the river and lower the opacity of that layer to create a transition.
I'd re-up it a bit and I guess it'll be perfect.
Yeah ! That's working pretty great ! If I was a "emmerdeur de classe internationale", please excuse my french, I'd argue that using irregular progressive shading for different rivers would work best but this is already pretty perfect.
It looks spectacular, Ilanthar
I'm not really enjoying the extreme speckliness of the parchment background, though. It looks different between the land and the ocean. I presume you have a layer with the land on it that's kind of blurring or lightening the parchment a bit? Maybe the ocean could do with exactly the same treatment. I don't know. I just find the ocean is making the land look a bit woolly, but that the land would look perfectly ok if the ocean wasn't so crisply dirty, or the dirt in the ocean wasn't so sharply focussed, or... something.
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Ahah , you're not . I began something, but It's not quite easy to do without doing a mess at this scale...By ThomasR
Yeah ! That's working pretty great ! If I was a "emmerdeur de classe internationale", please excuse my french, I'd argue that using irregular progressive shading for different rivers would work best but this is already pretty perfect.
Thanks ! Well, I did change contrast for waters... Maybe this test is better (just added some dark to the sea).By Mouse
I'm not really enjoying the extreme speckliness of the parchment background, though. It looks different between the land and the ocean. I presume you have a layer with the land on it that's kind of blurring or lightening the parchment a bit? Maybe the ocean could do with exactly the same treatment. I don't know. I just find the ocean is making the land look a bit woolly, but that the land would look perfectly ok if the ocean wasn't so crisply dirty, or the dirt in the ocean wasn't so sharply focussed, or... something.
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Oh yes! That's much better
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