Technical Slop

Other Methods

Two more methods of making a D-Map with a height map and a selection. Each with pros and cons.

Lighting Effects

Yes, Lighting Effects can be used to make a D-Map. Pretty neat trick, and I'm going to go a little fast.

Here is my height map. Just a circle with a silly cross in the middle. A basic doodle.

This is in an Alpha channel. Otherwise, it couldn't be used with Lighting Effects.

To the Layers palette! Start a new Layer, fill with 50% Gray, Filter > Render > Lighting Effects. Tada!

Personally, I like to use a red directional light shooting off to the right, and a green directional light light shooting down. Of course, you don't have to, but using a pure red light and a pure green light is important. Using a red and green light is to affect the appropriate channels for the D-Map. That is, any pure red lights will create channel #1 in the Red channel, and any green lights will create channel #2 in the Green channel. Spiffy.

Now, I really suck when it comes to using Lighting Effects. The graphic to the left is *not* what I ended up with immediately after Lighting Effects. What I ended up with was pretty crappy. Being the anally-minded D-Map maker that I am, I did some colour correction with Curves to get the final result you see to the left.

Saved it as a PSD, grabbed a photo of a desert, and got busy. I took it easy on Displace percentages and added some subtle lighting. Very not bad.

I find that Lighting Effects works best in situations where the height map is convoluted. You know, a bunch of different sized spots or pipe-like things of various widths. Try the Lighting Effects method on some Clouds/Difference Clouds. You just might be surprised.

Double Emboss

The Double Emboss technique is something I generally save for text or something similar. For things were the lines are mostly uniform.

Okay, copy the height map and run Filter > Stylize > Emboss. Copy the height map again and run Emboss a second time, but at a different angle. To the left are the results of my Embossing. I prefer to run the second Emboss at a 90° angle from the first one, but feel free to mix it up.

Cut-n-paste one of the Embosses into the Red channel, and cut-n-paste the second Embossing into the Green channel. Once again, my Blue channel is filled with 50% Gray. Save as a PSD and it's good to go.

Sorry, but no example of this one in action. You'll just have to try it for yourself. But I will tell you that smaller percentages are usually in order when using the Double Emboss technique.