Creating a Map using ArcGIS (A step-by-step guide)

hello guys welcome to another GIS tutorial in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to create this kind of a map using the GIS data that you might have and how to do custom configurations in order to fit your map depending on your objectives we will be using ArcGIS to create this map so let's go ahead and get started with the map so as you might see over here I have already prepared the three files that I'm actually going to use in order to create this map first of all I have a DM as you can see over here also I have got the river network which was in fact derived using the DM and also I have the particular watershed the the particular boundary of the watershed now in the finalized map that I showed you guys you see that the DM was actually clipped based on the boundary of the prior DM so first before doing anything else I'm just going to go ahead and first perform a clip operation just to clip my DM based on the given boundary of my watershed so for that we can just go to the search tool and we can type click since we are going to click a raster we have to go actually to the data management clip tool over here so from here we get the option to just simply drag and drop our DM and the extent will be defined by the watershed boundary shapefile and also I'm going to tick use input features for clipping geometry even though it's optional alright now once the clipping is done I can actually go ahead and get rid of this main TEM raster and if I uncheck the watershed boundary you will see that now it has been clipped depending on the based on the given watershed boundary now what I can do is I can actually activate this watershed boundary and instead of having a certain field color for this watershed boundary I'm just going to select no color as the fill color and I'm going to select dark black as the outline color and let me also go ahead and maybe increase the thickness of the of the line to 1 now what that does is actually you can see that it creates just the boundary of the of the watershed but it just takes out the field color the next thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to actually assign a certain color distribution for my de m now one of the easiest way you can do this would be just to go over here click on this color ramp and from here you can actually select a particular color amp depending on your interests as you can see over here we have a wide variety of color ramps to choose from something like this also looks fine but let me go ahead and maybe select this one now ideally I would like to actually have the river network in blue color but you see that in the color M which I chose there are certain areas which are actually represented in blue color especially since this raster being a DM which is a digital elevation model you see that these areas which are highlighted in blue color actually corresponds to high elevation areas if you look at the legend over here it shows that the highest elevation is two thousand ninety one meters above the mean sea level so that probably corresponds to some areas over here as you can see it's quite dark in terms of the intensity in terms of the intensity of blue so instead of choosing blue for the river what I'm going to do is I'm just going to select maybe black color for the time being let's see how it looks yeah I'm just going to leave it like this for the moment and next what I can do is I can also add a base map so in our case it's quite easy to add a base map you can go to file and add data and add a base map like this and from here I can actually select OpenStreetMap or any other type of map of your choice but for this map I'm actually going to go with the OpenStreetMap so what I can do is I can just select OpenStreetMap and then add it to my interface over here and if all your other files are properly geo-referenced specially your roster and all your polygons and polylines if they are probably geo-referenced then when I add the base map it'll actually get placed correctly in the correct position where it's supposed to be now for this example I have selected the location now for this example I have selected a watershed in Malaysia and as you can see over here it's actually getting placed in the correct geographical location all right so when preparing map using RJ's one thing to keep in mind is that right now you are in the data we've if you just hover your mouse over this small button that you can see over here it will show you that you are currently in the data we've and there's a button right next to it called the lay out with now if you want to switch to this layout be what you can do is you can just simply go ahead and click over here and that'll actually show you the the actual map layout when you print this map out this is how the map will get printed out and as you can see there are so many things that we actually have to do before we print the map out now one of the things that I would prefer to do is actually I would like to flip this the orientation of the page to from being portrait to landscape now that you can do simply by going to this change layout button over here and from here you can select either a three or a four I'm just going to go with actually there are other choices as well but I'm just going to go with a four landscape and if I click finish you can see now that the the page got flipped to landscape mode and just keep in mind that the outer border that you see is actually the border of the page but this inner border is actually the area where your map is being displayed now if you would like to fit the whole map into the page into the extent into the full extent of the page what you can do is you can simply drag this to fit it like this and from here as well but now you can see that we actually have quite a lot of space around here that we can even zoom the map out to focus more on our watershed right now there are actually two ways of doing this you can either flip back to the data we've and if you take the magnifying glass and if you zoom in to the extents of the watershed like this and when you go back to the layout wave you will see that the layout has also been zoomed in properly just to fit according to the bounds of the of the fo page as you can see over here but you don't have to do this necessarily instead you can also just stay in the layout width and you can again take the magnifying glass and then you can actually play around with the zoom with the level of zooming that you that you would like to have like this yeah I think now this is quite zoomed in just to fit appropriately into the into the fo page and then what you can do is you can actually take this pan tool and you can pan it around like this in case if you would like to move it to left or right or up or down when we are creating a standard map there are actually few comp which are quite necessary to have now one of those things is actually the North arrow now first I'm going to go ahead and add a note arrow to our map the way to do that would be you can just go to insert and add a North arrow and from here in this North arrow selector dialog box they're actually a wide wide array of North errors that you can select from I'm just going to go with this s3 note 7 style of North arrow yeah usually we can place the North arrow on the on the upper right corner of the map well you can place it in in another place as well but it's customary to actually place the North arrow in the upper right corner just like this you can even increase increase or decrease the size like this once you are done you can simply just go ahead outside of your layout outside of your page and then just click just to deselect whatever you have selected and if you would like to make further adjustments to be to the horizontal location of your watershed you can even move it like this you know leaving some space for a title or something like that alright and the second thing that I'm going to the second element that I'm going to add to our map is the is the scale bar now we can go to insert and then we can select the scale bar over here and from this select scale bar dialog box you can see that again we have a wide range of scale bars to choose from now I'm just going to go ahead and select the scale bar that looks maybe something like this which I personally have seen in most of the maps so that's one of the types of scale bus that I actually personally feel comfortable to use so usually the scale bar goes somewhere in the bottom of the map now since this is a scale bar as you can see over here when I drag the scale bar to actually extend its length you will see that the numbers change and if I shrink the scale bar you can see that the distance or the length which is being shown by this particular length of the scale bar is now actually different this particular feature actually can come come in handy for example let's say if you if you decide to leave your scale bar at a length like this or maybe I'll just try to extend it a bit more yeah now you can see that the distance from this point to this point is 28 kilometers so just by knowing that you can actually sort of transform that particular scale that you might acquire to your mind into some other place in the map as well for example you can see that if I want to get a quick visualization maybe if I want to get a quick idea about the distance from this corner of the watershed to this corner what I can see is I can actually just in my mind check how many scale bus would it take for me to actually cover this length starting from here up to here now roughly I would say about two and half so if I actually were to do it yeah maybe I was wrong it's approximately going to be about two so it should be less than 56 kilometres so I would say just about 40 50 50 51 or 52 or something like that so once the map is printed out you can do those kind of rough estimates just by having a scale bar so you can actually extend or shrink the scale bar depending on your on your preference maybe I can extend it a bit so that I have the length starting from 0 up to 30 kilometers and I can even double click on the scale bar and do some specialized effects as well such as making the font bold or increasing the font size maybe I'll set the font size to be living feel it's a bit too large so maybe yeah about 10 should be fine yeah so that so that's how you sketch set the scale bar in case if you would like to actually have a different background for the scale bar as well even that's possible yeah you can just go to frame and go to background and in this case I think that a background something like white would be sufficient yeah something like this and next one of the most important things is actually the legend of the map now as I explained to you guys before this is a digital elevation map that means the legend must have definitely should have the elevation distribution which corresponds to different colors which shows different elevations so that's one of the main things that should that should be there in the legend and apart from that you can also actually have things like the boundary of the of the watershed or the river network something like that well to do all of that you first have to add the which you can do simply by going to insert and select legend over here and this window the legend wizard the first window in the legend wizard actually shows you which shape files or which which rosters or which polygons that you would actually like to display in your map so as you can see over here in case if you do not want to display any of these items what you can do is you can simply select over here and then put it back like this and you can remove it like this and in case if you have removed everything you can actually put the element which you need back into this place by simply clicking over here and clicking on this arrow button and this option actually allows you to categorize your legend into different columns now for this tutorial I'm just going to actually stick with just one column and we'll just go ahead and click on next you can actually have this display as a title or if you don't want to have that you can actually even get rid of that once you create the legend I'm just going to first go ahead and accept all the default settings in this case similar to what I did over here when I was creating the scale bike and actually select a background maybe a white background and I can also you know add some extra effect by creating a drop shadow like this and now I'm just going to go ahead and click Next and over here I'm just going to accept the default settings and over here you can actually set the spacings now again until I create the religion I'm just going to actually accept the defaults but later on if you need you can actually make changes depending on on your preferences and this is the final option so once I'm okay with all the values I can just go ahead and click finish to create the legend all right now you can see that the legend got created but there are actually a couple of things that we need to alter in order to display the legend a bit more presentable now the first thing is actually the name of the legend I mean the element that's actually being represented by this legend as you can see over here I have the layer name as de M underscore clip one which happens to be the same name which has actually displayed over here now if you if you need to change this one of the easiest way to do that would be C click click once over here and it like toggle into a renaming mode and that'll give you the option to sort of rename the thing now I'm just going to rename it as elevation and within brackets I'm just going to specify meters or you can put meters above mean sea level if you're also dealing with a standard DM and once you are done with that you can see that when you just click somewhere else this already gets changed which is quite handy actually the other thing that I'm going to do is I mean I'm also actually going to change the setting of the drop shadow now if you would like to change certain things in this in this legend what you can do is you can double click on this and first I'm just going to go ahead and click on this frame and over here you can see that it's almost the it's exactly the same settings that we actually had before so I'm just going to select maybe the offset to be about let's say 2x offset and Y offset that'll sort of push back the drop shadow in too much maybe I'm just going to put this one as four and four let's see how that looks as you can see it's an exercise of trial and error if something doesn't look nice you can always just go back and change it and tweak it according to your preferences all right I think this drop shadow looks fine to me and now I'm just going to actually change the appearance of the legend values now you can see that it's sort of a color ramp which only shows the low and the high elevation values but the values in the middle are left for us to sort of interpret which might be a bit difficult and if you find it difficult especially if you are working with DMS if you're actually using another type of a layer then I think this might not be relevant but again if you're working with DMS boy or other type of rosters where we're classification can actually sort of help to pop up the different colors and give a meaningful touch to the to the appearance of the map what you can do is you can just simply click over here and go to properties and go to symbology and currently it's actually under the option stretched now since I want to display different values or different classes I'm just going to select on this classified option and I'm going to break this into a number of classes so the number of classes that you can break this into can be selected from here let's say I'm just going to go and select a higher number of classes let's say about 20 nothing 20 should be fine and you can click on this classify and you can select actually how these classes have been assigned now you can always tweak this and you know create your own groups own sort of classification ranges but if you don't want to do that you can actually also go to this method over here and select the classification method now for this I'm actually I would like to have equal intervals between each ranges between each range so I'm just going to go ahead and select equal interval over here which sort of split the ranges into equal intervals so as you can see over here the first range has been assigned for elevations ranging from 66 up to 160 7.25 and the second is actually twice of 167 point two five which is 266 point five and so on so it has been actually categorised into a number of equal intervals also you can select the color ramp over here now I'm just going to go back and select the same color ramp which I had before and I'm going to select apply and you can see that now the legend will also change yeah like this and in case if you would like to flip the color ramp what you can do is you can actually seem simply click over here on this symbol sort of the thing that looks like the heading of the column and from here you can indeed flip the colors as well and when you click apply you can see that the colors got flipped but I think in my case I would like to flip it back to what it was before one other thing that you notice is actually if you look at this this real legend over here let me go ahead and move this a bit you can see that there are so many decimal points which in certain cases might provide some helpful insight but since we are talking about elevations which are ranging from sixty-six up to twenty ninety-one 2091 metres certain decimals might not really be relevant in this case so I'm just going to go with whole numbers or integers and I'm going to get rid of all the decimal points which we can do by simply selecting on this label column heading and you can go to format format labels and uh number of decimal points you can actually select the decimal points to be 0 and click OK click apply we are left with a bunch of whole numbers which looks much more clear in terms of in terms of the definition or the order categorization of the elevation classes alright so just going to go ahead and click OK now we can even move the legend back into here well you can always do the tweaks depending on your needs and well now I feel like I don't really need to have this legend because I only have one class over here and to me it looks a bit more a bit distracting so going to double click over here and go to general and select and deselect this one so that when I click apply this legend thing will actually just disappear I would also like to bold these letters this numbers so I I can go to items and from here you can actually select to which particular location that you would like to apply these effects to so I'm just going to select apply to all labels and then select bold and click on apply now everything turned to be bold alright now click OK and you can see that there's another option called value over here now if you if you have something meaningful to add over here what you can do is you can simply click once and toggle the the renaming mode and write something for example some description about the units or something like that but in my case I actually don't have anything meaningful to write over there so I'm just going to delete that and click somewhere outside and as you can see the distance between the heading and the and the legend components actually got removed so now this looks quite alright to me and you can equally resize the legend if you would like to increase the size a bit to fit it into the extents of your map yeah I think it looks quite alright now and after you do all this you can even again take the pan tool and then you know pan it around just to make it just to fit your content appropriately now that you have add a couple of more components to your map all right before we finalize the map I feel like one important thing from our map is missing which is the latitude and longitude indications now you can actually add those through adding a grid or you can only opt to add those information on at the borders of the map without having to add add a grid so let's go ahead and find out how to do this so what you can do is you can click on your map go to properties right click properties and from here just come to grids and create a new grid now there are certain types of grids actually that you can add you can add a graticule which divides the map by millions and barrels or you can even add a measured grid or a reference grid I'm just going to go with the first option the graticule and from here you can specify the distance at which you would like to place your parallels and meridians now I'm just going to specify an interval of 10 minutes so at each 10 minutes there will be parallels and meridians added into the map and these settings I'm just going to leave it like this and click finish and then you can click apply all right now you can see that we sort of added a grid and if I click OK over here and if i zoom it a bit more you can actually start seeing the degrees minutes seconds longitude and latitude values in both horizontal and vertical directions now for this map I would actually still like to retain these labels of pillaji longitude and latitude values but I'm going to flip this for example in the vertical side of the map I would actually like to flip this but on the horizontal sides which means at top and bottom I think this looks fine but on the left and the right side I would like to actually flip this to have it written in a vertical manner and at the same time I'm also going to get rid of these grids because I think that it's a bit distracting to our map from what I feel but in case if you if you prefer to have it you can actually still have it alright so to do those kind of edits you can again once again click on your map and go to properties and now since you have added already a graticule you can just double click on this and all the edits that you would make now will be applicable to this particular Red Hill which you added from here the label orientation I would like to have the vertical labels on left and right sides so I'm just going to only take those two options and click OK and click apply and you can see that it actually flipped two to the vertical direction alright and again let's go ahead and double click this because we are we are not completely done with all the edits that we need to do I'm also going to increase the font size to be about eight let's see how it looks if I bold the letters yeah I think I think we're better off without bolding the letters but still retain that font size double click on this again and now we will deal with the inner grits we can go to these lines and we can say do not show lines or ticks and if you do that you will see that the lines inside the map will actually sort of disappear I think now this is good enough but we still have one thing to fix because you can see that all these longitude and latitude values are outside the border of our map now if I export this map as a PDF or maybe as a JPEG or something you will notice if you do that that these things which are outside the border of the map will not actually get printed so this map will look exactly like how it would be without this longitude and latitude values so what I'm going to do is I'm going to shrink the map back into our border in a way that it'll allow some space for the longitude and latitude values to sort of you know display yeah I guess this is good enough maybe I can tweak this a bit to create a bit more space over here from the top I think this looks fine but but when I did that you can see that some parts of my watershed actually get cut from top and bottom so I have to go back to the Zoom Out button and then maybe zoom this one out a bit first and then zoom it back in in a way that it actually covers the full extent of the watershed yeah like this I can pan it to the left a bit and also adjust the locations of the North arrow as well as the scale bar all right now I guess we're almost done since we are using a base map over here if you would like to sort of drive the attention of the weavers to the map but not to the background too much what you can do is the cool trick would be actually to increase the transparency of your base map now you can do that simply by going to base map option over here go to properties and you can increase the transparency maybe set the transparency to be about 15% yeah now you can see that the the attention of the view is directed more towards the the contents of the map rather than to the background before we wrap this tutorial I'm just going to also show you a cool trick in order to make your DM more visually pleasing now this might work with actually a DM but not particularly with other types of layers so if you're also trying to create a map of a DM one cool trick that you can do is actually you can first create a hill shade now let me go ahead and show you how to do that what I can do is I can just simply type Hill shade over here and go to 3d analyst and I can create input this roster and I'm going to specify the Z factor to be actually 1 and we can click OK now this will create a hill shade for us so this is how the hill shade looks now again as you can see that now the hill shade actually has been added to our map which sort of destroys our legend over here as well so I actually don't want to add this hill shade to my map so what I can do is I can go to these legend properties by double clicking on it and I'm going to go to general and click on this hillshade and put it back to the left side because we don't need it in the in the proper legend all right now you can see that the hillshade is actually on top of the real DM so what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this and then put it under this DM and right now it looks it doesn't look any different from what it was before and what I can do is I can actually go ahead and select properties over here of my real DM and I can go to display and see what happens when I increase the transparency let's say by about 10% you can see that through the DM we actually start seeing the hillshade since the hillshade has sort of addy sort of a 3d property it actually sort of reflects through this DM when we increase the transparency like this let's say if I put about 15% yeah just make sure that you actually don't or we do this one because if we put let's say about 40% actually that'll sort of wash out all the colors which we do not need but maybe I think we can push it as far as about 20% yeah I think that should be fine or maybe just leave it about 15% because I don't want to lose the real colors as well and finally when everything is done or even before you wrap up everything you can even just go ahead and add a title just to make your map you know a bit more complete so in order to add a title you can just go to insert and go to title over here and from here you can actually give the title that which you would like to have for example I'm going to name this as elevation map of the watershed something like that and you can actually freely freely move this one as well in order to place it in the correct place and double click on it in case if you would like to actually change some properties of the map properties of the characters for example I'm just going to maybe bold the letters and increase the font size as well a bit more maybe about 28 let's say yeah I think it should it looks fine just going to place this one as well over here and finally when everything is done you can actually export this map into a JPEG now the way to do that would be you can go to file and you can go to export map and from here select the place to which you would like to export your map and you can actually play around with the resolution now if you would like to have a very high-resolution map you can increase the DPI and when you increase it you will see that your width and height pixels will also increase now for example if I would like to have a map with about 400 dpi you can see that these are the corresponding types of corresponding width and height in terms of pixels and over here you can adjust the quality of your JPEG and also you can select the color mode just going to select 24-bit true color and I'm I'm going to select the highest quality and after that you can just click maybe give a name over here watershed elevation dot jpg and you can see over here actually there are other types as well but I'm just going to go ahead with jpg and once you are done with that you can just simply save and it might take a couple of seconds to export the map yeah once you see export complete over here you can actually navigate back to the place where you exported the map to yeah over here you can see that I have one jpg called watershed elevation and that's how it looks you can even put it into the full-screen mode if you would like yeah it looks quite good alright I guess we are done with whatever we wanted to do now of course all the options that we discussed today and we explored further in detail but the objective of this tutorial was to actually give you an idea of how to how to create a proper map using the map layout of our GIS now you can always play around and see how the tools can actually be manipulated to wear a specialized map that fits your needs so if you do have any questions don't forget to comment them down below and if you haven't subscribed to our channel yet consider subscribing as well and as you might know we are running an introduction to Python for absolute beginners course these days so if you are keen on actually learning Python directed towards using Python for geospatial analysis I'm sure this course will benefit you guys greatly so don't forget to subscribe and stay tuned for upcoming tutorials as well so thanks a lot for watching guys I'll see you in the next one

Channel: GeoDelta Labs

Views: 62,946

Rating: 4.9365077 out of 5

Keywords: basemap, create, map, using, arcgis, arcmap, map layout, how to, basic, legend, north arrow, scale bar

Id: n83ZuJWpk_I

Length: 31min 18sec (1878 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 16 2020