Turn a greyscale heightmap into a shaded relief map?

[dewrad]

Hi all, this is my first post here. I've looked through the archives for an answer to my question, but am not having any luck so far.

Essentially, I have a greyscale heightmap like this:

Screen Shot 2016-09-18 at 16.03.28.png

That I want to turn into something like this:

Europe_topography_map_en.png

I'm using GIMP, and there doesn't seem to be a straightforward way to convert the black-to-white gradient into anything else. Can anybody help?

[waldronate]

https://docs.gimp.org/en/plug-in-gradmap.html may be of interest.

[snodsy]

You may want to look into the free gis program- QGIS, where you can make relief maps to import into your program

[Falconius]

Arsheesh's tutorial is where I learned about these gimp functions: https://www.cartographersguild.com/s...ad.php?t=18280

[johnvanvliet]

it depends on what you want
something that just looks good
or
something that IS scientifically accurate

for just " looking ok" gimp 2.8 dose a GREAT job on 8 bit grayscale heightmaps
( gimp2.9.4 the plugin is currently broken in the TESTING version of gimp)
-- from Gimp
--Shaded Relief


-- gradient colored Shaded Relief


for accuracy you NEED a heightmap in 16 bit signed integer and a GIS program like Qgis or the terminal program GDAL