How to apply Swiss-style shaded relief on Photoshop?

[Skalimoi]

Hi everyone. I've been working on Wilbur in order to make a terrain for a story I'm developing. I already have a height map and a shaded relief I plan on using for various maps. Yesterday I was researching on some relief shading techniques and I stumbled upon this one, maybe you're familiar with it:

http://www.reliefshading.com/colours/grey/

At first, it seemed easy to implement it in Photoshop, using an image of mine I've attached below. However, I've tried to do it on my own for days and it's no use. What is the best workflow for this type of techniques? Do you have any helpful documents? Thank you in advance, I'm going crazy with this!

If you need more information I haven't said feel free to ask.

[fusblr]

It's trickier than it looks. I managed to do a not-terrible job, but I think one of the issues was that your image doesn't have a lot of sharply defined edges, where as the swiss relief shading maps have very sharp, defined edges.

My path towards it: I made a layer for each color then used levels (or you can use curves) to change the colors. After I found the color I wanted I put the level selector back to RGB and played with it until it was okay. I used the layer order that they had: grey, violet, blue, yellow pink. I reduced the fill % of each layer to around 30 +/- 5 depending on what I needed to pop out more. I used a plain white layer as a background. The problem I had was that the white of each layer was blocking too much color from coming through. I needed a way to make the white transparent. Without delving deeper into how I wanted to do that I simply pulled up each layer and masked the white parts. As you can see it has the right idea, but that's as far as I delved into it making it work.



-Craig

[Skalimoi]

It's trickier than it looks. I managed to do a not-terrible job, but I think one of the issues was that your image doesn't have a lot of sharply defined edges, where as the swiss relief shading maps have very sharp, defined edges.

My path towards it: I made a layer for each color then used levels (or you can use curves) to change the colors. After I found the color I wanted I put the level selector back to RGB and played with it until it was okay. I used the layer order that they had: grey, violet, blue, yellow pink. I reduced the fill % of each layer to around 30 +/- 5 depending on what I needed to pop out more. I used a plain white layer as a background. The problem I had was that the white of each layer was blocking too much color from coming through. I needed a way to make the white transparent. Without delving deeper into how I wanted to do that I simply pulled up each layer and masked the white parts. As you can see it has the right idea, but that's as far as I delved into it making it work.

-Craig

Yes, I supposed there was indeed something with my image. I guess I'll use Wilbur again to erode a little bit more on it so there isn't so much "noise" and has a sharper appearance. Your approach is similar to the one I used but improved, so it's definitely the right way. Thank you!

[waldronate]

One important detail about that style of cartography is that it doesn't have "correct" lighting. The lighting direction varies to best show local features. There are also some ways that the tones blend that aren't obvious in the article that you referenced. Bernhard Jenny did a fair amount of work on the subject a while back. http://www.cartography.oregonstate.e...yleShading.pdf is a good reference for doing this on a computer. Also take a look at Tom Patterson's site ( http://shadedrelief.com/ ) for some good examples of how to get the delicate details associated with this style.

[Skalimoi]

One important detail about that style of cartography is that it doesn't have "correct" lighting. The lighting direction varies to best show local features. There are also some ways that the tones blend that aren't obvious in the article that you referenced. Bernhard Jenny did a fair amount of work on the subject a while back. http://www.cartography.oregonstate.e...yleShading.pdf is a good reference for doing this on a computer. Also take a look at Tom Patterson's site ( http://shadedrelief.com/ ) for some good examples of how to get the delicate details associated with this style.

Thank you for that reference! Aside from that article, I spent a fair amount of time researching documents such as that, but they only described the "manual" way and not a correct reference on doing it with a computer, and the only ones I could find mentioning that were not concise enough. I'll try this to see if it works now that k have a better heightmap.

[waldronate]

http://berniejenny.info/publications.html is Bernhard Jenny's collected list of publications. It's worth a quick peek at if you're interested in that sort of thing. The font is hideous but the content is pretty good.