creating a ground texture

Hi there;

I've got a low/intermediate knowledge of photoshop. What I'd like to do is create a texture for ground cover, one side of the texture would have grass on it and the other side would have snow on it. I want the transistion from grass to snow to be a gradual change.

Can someone tell me how to do this? Or point me to a website or tutorial that will help me?

Thanks in advance.
RT

Try putting the grass texture and the snow texture on separate layers. Then, on one layer create a rectangular mask that covers about a half of the layer. Go to the "Refine Edge" settings and make your Feather setting a suitably large number and then use Edit > Clear. That will remove about half of the layer and leave you with a gradual fade out toward the other half. You'll have to experiment a bit to figure out how wide to make that feathered zone, but it isn't too hard.

BTW, it makes sense to do the process I described in my earlier message on the layer that has the least detail (your snow layer, in this case), and obviously to have that layer on top. That way, the details on the other layer (the grass) will remain crisp and will look as if they are being buried in progressively deeper snow. Also, there's clearly nothing magic about using a rectangular mask. If you let your mask have an irregular, curvilinear edge instead of a straight one, you will get a more natural-looking transition on the ground.

If you want to get really artistic and you know what your topography looks like, you can monkey with the mask so you get snow appearing to accumulate in areas that will be low, while the grass peeks out on tops of ridges or in the wind shadow behind trees or other obstacles.