Topographical Map Photoshop Artifacts

[Savage Baron]

I have been playing around with some hex maps for board games and have noticed some 'artifacts' from the blur/feather functions in Photoshop when I start finalizing the maps.

The maps are created as 16 bit RGB but there is some noticeable 'terracing' with some of the bevel and embossing techniques that I've noticed. Has anyone else encountered this and have a work around?

I've tried simple solutions such as adding 1-2% noise and blurring out to around 8 pixels. The noise doesn't seem to have much effect and the blurring seems to aggravate the problem.

[waldronate]

Is the selection 16 bits per channel as well as the RGB? In my ancient PS 5.1 I can definitely see the artifacts you mention if I feather a selection sufficiently, fill it with white, and then emboss it. One thing to try is to use a few small Gaussian blur operation (0.5 pixel, 4 or 5 repeats of that tiny blur). If you're not already doing it, I recommend putting your terrain elevation on a separate layer from the color texture, embossing that layer, and using Multiply blend mode to get the final effect. That way, you can do awful things to the elevation without worrying about the underlying coloring. Similarly, you can put the noise on one layer and the gentle elevations on another and then emboss the multiplied result.

[Savage Baron]

The multiple smaller blends seems to take care of the issue fairly well! Thanks again for the information!