Enhancing a hillshade visualization in ArcGIS Pro

this video will demonstrate how to create a hill shade layer in arcgis pro and enhance it a little bit to make it look nice they have a detailed depiction of the terrain that we can use in our maps and analysis so we're starting out with the dem this is the area in benton county washington near the yakima river and what we're going to start with is just making a basic hill shade using the default options so if you go into your analysis toolbox and search for hill shade you can get it right here and we'll go ahead and put in the dem as the input raster output raster i'm just going to call default hill shade the z factor will be one in this case our vertical units are matching our xy units down here both are measured in meters if they were not both measured in meters we would need to get those to match up either by running raster calculator to adjust these units or by running a project tool to run adjust these units or we could set a z-factor other than one describing the difference between the units let's go ahead and run this tool here's our default hill shade we just want to make sure that it looks fine it's an artistic depiction of the terrain there's a few little weird artifacts in here that are coming from the dem itself we're just going to ignore those in this case notice our values are between 0 and 256 that's just a value of lightness or darkness depending on whether a shadow or shaded area has been modeled here these pixel values really don't mean anything they're just for drawing the hill shade artistically now let's enhance this make it look a little bit nicer what we're going to do here is apply some transparency so we're going to go to the appearance tab and this transparency bar will allow us to make the hill shade a little more transparent we're going to make it 60 transparent so that we can see that dem underneath and uh if you have trouble getting the slider right on the money you can just type it in like that okay notice how this gives us more visual cue about where the elevation goes upward and you can choose any color ramp you want here so if you right click now in your dem color ramp you've got a lot of other choices some of them which are very nice for depicting terrain i can use this one for example it goes from just green to brown i actually want the higher elevations to be brown in my case and that's what they are green elevations are lower so you can see this ridge here and we can see this ridge over here so this is looking nicer but there's even more we could do to accentuate some of these uh changes in relief these canyons and so on one trick for doing that is to make a slope layer and just very lightly add it to the top of this with the transparency applied so let's search for the slope tool and make that slope using spatial analyst tools and make sure here for your input raster you don't put the hill shade you're you're going to get something pretty weird if you do that so make sure you put in the dem and we'll just call this something like benton slope [Music] it doesn't matter whether you have output in degrees or percent for this we do want to make sure our z factor is correct with this data we're using one so let's go ahead and run the slope by default when you run a slope in arcgis the output is symbolized with this classified look from white to brown we're going to change this so that we're going from white to gray or dark gray so let's go the symbology we're going to change classify to stretch this will give us a more continuous view and then we're just going to invert this color scheme here okay so in the case of dark to light we could choose format color scheme this is just one way to do it and then reverse the color scheme like this click ok so now notice where we've got a lot of change in relief such as this little canyon or these little valleys we have a darker color and what we're going to do with this is make it about 80 percent transparent as we make this transparent and you'll see the other stuff coming through and how this slope layer really relates to the landscape so here it's at 100 we can't see it and i like to set it kind of down around 80 85. you get too much it looks a little uh overdone so you're just trying to hit the sweet spot here of using it to enhance the look of that slope okay so here's our final output layer and if you wanted to you could add these to a scene tilt them look at it in 3d i show how to do that in the other video about visibility analysis but you could certain you could certainly apply those techniques with these slope and shape slope and hill shade layers yeah to look at this in three dimensions

Channel: CWU Geography

Views: 211

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: YynmHAUr21I

Length: 5min 28sec (328 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021