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### 1.2 Displacement maps As I said before, we’ll add some shadows at the borders of selected zones . Hand painting them would be a nightmare. There would be one easy way : Photoshop layers are able to cast a shadow over the background. But I chose a trickier way which gives much better results. The displace filter allows to move each pixel of an amount defined by a “displacement map”, which is a picture in psd format. Therefore, it’s easy to “stretch” some black pixels over the areas we want to shade. This allows us to make realistic irregular shadows. Here are the specific “displacement maps” I use for Evergreen/mixed forest Urban areas. NOTE : I called them “DMtrees” and “DMBuildings”. (Convert them to grey levels and save as psd if you want to use these). Note that “DMBuildings” is designed for a 220° sun position! Refer to the Photoshop help files for more details about displacement maps.
We’ll use the displace filter as well in order to make the forest borders look irregular and random. I called this map DMRandomLarge and made also a much smaller version for smaller irregularities. (You can use it once converted to psd format – and experiment!)