Hypsometric/Swiss Style Shaded Relief Experiment

[arakish]

I created mine own Hypsometric/Swiss Style color shading style and thought I ask for y'all's opinion on it. Please note that the focus of this is on the land, not the color of the ocean.

The ocean color was chosen before I made the shading relief and will change before settling on a final style. However, please let me know if I should use a darker or lighter base color for the ocean. Still working on the ocean color ramp.

Thanks for the C&C.

rmfr

[Midgardsormr]

Very nice! I think you could use a gentler ramp into the uppermost elevations, though. I'm not sure if it's the saturation or the value or both, but the dark brown is creating a very distinct ring around the mountains. Also, did you scale up at some point? Your coasts are aliased, and the gradient has some artifacts in it.

The shaded relief is marvelous. Care to share how it was done?

[arakish]

Very nice! I think you could use a gentler ramp into the uppermost elevations, though. I'm not sure if it's the saturation or the value or both, but the dark brown is creating a very distinct ring around the mountains. Also, did you scale up at some point? Your coasts are aliased, and the gradient has some artifacts in it.

Yeah, I didn't see those artifacts until I looked at it again. But I moved on to fixing the "distinct ring" of brown by redoing the color ramp.

The shaded relief is marvelous. Care to share how it was done?

The maps were created using ArcMap at work by exporting a Terrain, Colored, and Hillshade layers. Then, at home, I used Photoshop (an old and decrepit version 6 but it still works!!) to make the image.

Then I tried another experiment with some simple Photoshop techniques to compare with maps created with ArcMap. The attached images are listed below.

HypsoExper02am.jpg & HypsoExper03am.jpg - 2nd and 3rd experiments created solely with the layers Colored and Hillshade exported from ArcMap.

HypsoExper02ps.jpg & HypsoExper03ps.jpg - 2nd and 3rd experiments created entirely in Photoshop using only the Terrain layer exported from ArcMap.

As can be seen, ArcMap can create much better Hillshades than Photoshop's Lighting Effects. This is simply due to the fact that Photoshop can only use 8-bits of data (pure greyscale) where ArcMap can use full 32-bit grid files. ArcMap grid files are rasters, however each grid cell (pixel) contains 32-bits of data. This data, specifically for DEM rasters, is nothing more than a floating point number depicting elevation. Rasters in graphics programs are only long integers containing a color value, and maybe an alpha value. Although ArcMap is limited to the same number of greys as Photoshop, it still uses the 32-bits, sophisticated Color Ramps, and sophisticated algorithms for applying the color ramps. Photoshop's gradients and lighting effects just can't compare. Perhaps even Photoshop v15 (aka CS5) still couldn't come close. I do know that Photoshop 15 still cannot handle anything more than an 8-bit heightfield raster (had access at college).

I have just begun learning to use Quantum GIS (QGIS) to see if I can't get the same effects as ArcMap, but the process is slow since QGIS does not have as sophisticated a symbol editor as ArcMap. It is much easier creating a color ramp in ArcMap than I have been able to do in QGIS. But I am still trying and learning.

Also attached, I included a Photoshop GRD file with the Hypsometric Gradients I created to match the ArcMap color ramps as best as possible. Of course, you can simply move the color stops as you see fit.

I am also looking into making a DEM with Wilbur. If waldronate sees this post, I'd appreciate an answer to this: Is there a file format in Wilbur which will create a 32-bit grid file which uses floating point numbers? I will look into Wilbur's help to find this, but you might answer before I find it.

Keep watching. I'll keep posting my experiments in this topic.

Thanks for the C&C.

rmfr

[waldronate]

Wilbur can read a raw binary raster using File>>Import>>Image Subsection. It will read 1, 2, 4, and 4-byte IEEE-754 float rasters in LSB or MSB byte order.

Wilbur should be able to read some basic file formats such as the elderly USGS DEM format. One of these years I'll get around to including GDAL support via plugin so Wilbur will be able to read many, many file formats.

[arakish]

Sorry I have been gone a while. But I am still in recovery from a double surgery. Me guts were cut open and several malignant polyps were removed. However, before I could actually get this surgery done, me appendix infected, then burst before it could be removed. At the same time, the doctors decided to get the polyps also. I am still in recovery and doing anything is slow.

For example, I reziped the Hypso gradients I made in Photoshop and thought of uploading them. Then I saw I already did it on the second post. Gads, I've got to play to ketchup now.

Thanks for this wonderful site.

rmfr

P.S. - I am now trying to make my first city map and may post a WIP. Just so slow in getting anything done right now.

[jbgibson]

Yikes! That's been a rough month! Do take it easy - no pressure from here, for sure. On the plus side, you can make any kind of mistake at all, and later say "ehhh, that was the painkillers" :-).

--------
A friend will help you move. A good friend will help you move a body.

[Coyotemax]

Hope your recovery goes well, i'm guessing you have a laptop so you can putter without leaving the bed? I'd have gone crazy without a laptop during my own convalescence
And take advantage of the drug induced haze while you can, it's amazing what people will let you get away with when you tell them you're on heavy painkillers, lol

[jetfx]

Oh wow!

That's some nice stuff. This is also the first thing I've seen on here that used ArcMap to do some of the mapping. I've not yet tried it, but how did you go about getting ArcMap to accept fictional a fictional DEM? I've only generated similar reliefs using real data.