How to Make Water Depth Contour Maps with Inkscape and Trace Bitmap

I'm Rick Johansson and this is iron Echo design I want to show you how to make a water map like this with the depth Contours the inkscape part is very easy we use Trace bit map to extract each different layer and I'll show you the steps on how to do the effect the trick is where do you get the data in an earlier tutorial we used open cmap which gives great Contours but questions like this were coming in when I zoom in on the area I want it doesn't have enough definition so I did some research and I found a far superior way how to get the information that we need you want to go to nautical charts. noaa.gov I'll have a link in the description below and you can type in wherever you want to go or you can zoom in here's Cape Cod and Boston we'll go north of Boston to my favorite one of my favorite spots Crane Beach this is actually it right here you can see the depth Contours are clearly defined but there's way too much action on this chart luckily they give us a lot of options so we can clean it up first let's zoom in right about here is good on the sidebar menu you'll see these Stacks click that on the layer list we can deselect some of this some of it stays some of it goes information about the chart that can go natural and man-made features that stays depth that'll stay CED no traffic Roots no special areas buoys Services everything else goes before I take you to the next part click on these three dots you'll see transparency pops up you can slide it from the depth chart we're using into I guess this is the default map that they use but check this out if you hit these four boxes the base map Gallery some of these Maps they provide are pretty impressive I can hit imagery this is pretty sharp I'm not going to zoom in because I don't want to mess up my scale but here's Crane Beach here's one of the channels you can take to get there by boat here's another I wanted to show you this in case you wanted to isolate exactly the part of the map that you want you can slide the transparency to depth chart full map all right go up to the Gear first go to depth Contour tab the example I want to demonstrate to today needs at least three or four maybe even five different depths right now I only see one the blue and the green I think represents the low tide Mark but you can change that very easily on shallow Contour it's at 10 m make it one apply there you go we can use the different colors with Trace bit map to create the different depths the colors are off I don't know why light blue was deeper than this dark blue and why is green even being used but we'll fix that if your map still has more labels and data go to miscellaneous some of these attributes don't change anything but down here display categories deselect standard deselect other none of these really affect anything if you go to the bottom where you can't scroll anymore there is one key two color depth Zone Shades if you have that on it makes anything shallower than a certain point all the same color it ruins the whole effect make sure you have two color depth Zone Shades off hit these two triangles to get rid of the sidebar position things the way you want and there is no rightclick download so you'll have to do a screenshot if you need help learning how to do a screen capture let me know in the comments and I'll see about getting you some options let's go back into inkscape and wherever you put the screenshot whether it be the desktop or a folder drag it onto the canvas you'll see a popup box image type embed DPI from file okay and here's a trick you may or may not have seen before the page is right there if you have the map selected you can go to file document properties and this right here resize to content that will change the page for us automa atically it's going to be helpful at the end if you want to export this in a defined area and now we can go to work Trace bit map if you've never used it is under path Trace bit map I've got a bunch of tutorials on this for today move over to the multicolor tab detection mode colors and the default is eight here's your preview pane eight is going to be too many to demonstrate what I mean if I do two colors enter you can see exactly what Trace bit map is going to extract change it to three here's the first difference in depth four and that's all we want if I go back to five 6 7 8 you're going to take details you don't want and some of the actual colors might get split into two different pieces we need everything as one piece so we can make the Contour quickly I've got my scans back to four Speckles smooth Corners optimize all selected I have mine at 21.2 very important for this tutorial deselect smooth deselect stack and don't choose remove background apply here it is now we have the vector version of the map and I can choose object fill and stroke to open up the fill and stroke menu cuz this will help us isolate each layer if I click on this layer here hey crew turn Rubik's Cube yeah okay if I click on this layer here on the fill and stroke menu if I have the fill tab I can see it's selected and that's going to allow us to change the color with the eyedropper to the land color go to the deep water eyedropper dark blue next layer ey dropper mid and the green will finally look better when we change it to the light blue now you might notice there's some words here you can get rid of any extra text like that by double clicking and if you hold shift you can make a bounding box over everything hit delete that's one of the layers do it again click on whatever you see left shift bounding box delete and that takes care of that all right so here is the effect to do the depth click off of everything so you have nothing selected I'll click on the deepest shift second deepest keep holding shift and get the shallows so I have three of the different layers selected go up to filters shadows and glows drop shadow now over here you'll see your menu for blur radius you can play around with this to play what you doing come on over what are you doing are you having a popsicle yeah we're making a map let me just finish this real quick okay you can watch if you want blur radius .5 horizontal offset 2 vertical offset set 05 you want to have it set to shadow type outer live preview that's looking good right there apply we need to get the land and an hierarchy up here put it on the top with it's still selected go back to filters shadows and glows drop shadow there she goes and this time you can play around with it again if you want but I'll keep the exact same settings live preview that looks good apply and you've got it all right I think this will be a really short tutorial for today I got my hands full you can always put a label on at the end did you want to say anything crew come up to the mic and say it he's got a channel himself he just started go ahead if you want to check out my channel it's called cruise reviews okay all right we'll see you next time see you

Channel: IronEcho Design

Views: 6,613

Keywords: Inkscape, Rick Johanson, Depth Map, Inkscape Tutorial, Free course, Trace Bitmap, Depth Contour, Map art, IronEcho, Iron Echo, IronEcho Design

Id: v7M2XfzFlEU

Length: 6min 54sec (414 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 31 2023