Lecture 7 - Advanced Cartography – Raster Shaded Relief

hi this is kevin with matt practical and this is advanced cartographic design lecture number seven raster shaded relief talking about making beautiful terrain depictions that make our maps stand out and pop make people want to look at them and enjoy them so raster shader relief is a model of how light would fall across the landscape so it shows the nuances of the train the ups and downs the ridges the valleys right it was always hand-painted in the past but now it's created digitally sometimes without the effect that we want it's comprised of two layers at least okay there's a hill shade which is usually a grayscale model of how the light falls across the landscape and that's made from the original dm and then a color ramp that might be added over the top what we call hypsometric tint all right and that is usually the original dem with the color ramp and then some transparency those together become shaded relief the light source is traditionally in the upper left-hand corner of your map uh and it's at an azimuth of about 315 degrees and about 45 degrees altitude of the sun in the sky from zero to 90. that is the traditional that's usually where we start some landscapes might be better represented if we change that slightly but in the beginning we go with the defaults and it just depends on what we're trying to do if you're trying to get your light into the bottom of the grand canyon you most likely will have to change these default settings if you're just going for a standard hill shade hypsometric tint shaded relief then you might be able to go with the defaults all right the master relief artist that's where it all comes from so it's always worth to look back at the masters in order so that we can learn and hopefully try to replicate what they did in a digital workflow so let's see what we can do the master edward impov right the proper rendering of terrain is one of the primary tasks in cartography he said it all he literally wrote the book the representation of relief it's a large volume that's very dense and very academic he was a swiss cartographer and he's known for his famous paintings of the swiss alps that back a lot of the swiss toppo map series edward impov always had very fine relief with subtle colors and he really went into trying to represent shadows in something other than just pure gray of course he started out by hand drawing he took a expedition to minnekoa in china drew the mountain in pencil and in ink and so these oblique drawings fed into and informed his relief drawings i did a lot of work in the swiss alps like the santees always locating your light source right and your shadows and knowing how the light would fall across the landscape and then these uh you know nice panoramics from the tops of mountains he was an avid mountaineer he would climb to the top and break out his drawing pad and just sketch beautiful works of art um this led to him also making relief models and you can learn a lot about terrain by trying to model it at two scale so some of his relief models are so good that we can actually use them for science today including this model here the horn right so you've got this beautiful glacier coming down and then a modern picture and they're actually using the model to help us inform how much the glacier has receded over the last hundred years or so extremely detailed work he went into treaties on how to make these models how you could create a base for them carve out a rough render in clay pour some plaster over it turn it over and then carve the rest out and then make another form from that and then of course hand either paint or airbrush over the top of it to give its realistic look and then he got into of course his shady relief drawings some of his early work was very patchy along these lines here but slowly he developed techniques that gave it a much better more natural look right and you can see kind of a development over time of starting out with you know a very kind of abstract relief getting better and better until he had very fine very fine relief that was showing every nook and cranny at certain scales inside the swiss alps his master relief pieces ended up backing large topographic sets produced by the swiss government and he spent a lot of time trying to get uh hinting and highlighting in a more realistic and colorful way so he he did deep study and went into how you could get greens and grays and purples and blues to help bring out the relief in your maps all right and so here is a plate of his central alps of switzerland that ended up in the topo set and you can see it's more of a morning light with some yellows and oranges right but then with the cold blue and the fog sitting down in the um the valleys of the ura and places like that really really beautiful work it all came from stereo pairs so you'd start out with stereo photographs produce contour lines from that and then think about how you would actually add the shaded relief to the contour lines to make the landscape pop up out of the page and then he also worked with adding different color schemes so instead of just going with a straight gray you know grayscale shader relief and then putting hypsometric tint over it what about if you used colors of blues with highlights of yellows for the tops and you could end up with a much more realistic look at the end and we try to do that now in our digital workflows he also did thematic maps of switzerland that were very detailed incredibly beautiful like this one showing population centers right with lucerne and then uh zurich there and the the population based on whether it's rural or whether it's urban was different symbology and of course for most master relief artists the the penultimate is to do a map of mount everest you know the highest mountain in the world so he did an incredible map in 62 of the entire everest region um all hand-drawn with every single piece of glacial erratic hand placed on the tops of the glaciers so all the little dots coming down the glaciers all right so this is a beautiful set with loopsy in there noopsy and then everest over uh on the right and then down here below that's imja stay so that's island peak and i climbed that peak in 2006 it was incredible to get on the top of a mountain that's almost as high as denali but still have lotsi hanging over your head like a giant tsunami about to crash totally different game there moving on to more modern hand relief artists tiber toth tibertoff was the hand relief artist for the national geographic for almost 30 years he painted relief through all the different styles from pencil to pen to eventually hand painted with airbrushes and then made the move to digital workflow inside of photoshop using simulated airbrushes inside of photoshop he's really famous for his relief of the grand canyon it's certainly another test piece for relief artists incredible work i believe i have a zoom of it yes trying to reproduce this in the modern workflow and get some of that texture has been a goal for a long time as we'll see later some of the master modern relief artists like tom patterson have really made some headway in getting there some really nice techniques but teber toth had excellent work all coming from his hands his relief work for the sea floor was featured in a number of articles and maps in the national geographic and really for the first time uh you know gave the world the ability to explore what the the bathymetry on the bottom of the ocean would look like and a lot of this data was just coming in the form of spreadsheets which then he would translate into a beautiful map so his work around iceland is just fantastic if you look at it here right so taking those same uh concepts and ideas and techniques from painting relief in the mountains and putting it in the blue palette at the sea floor and of course the masters always move to do mount rivers so his mount everest map is still a classic 1988 i have one of these up on my wall when you zoom into it you see that he really got the hand-painted relief and all of the little rock outcrops and so forth just right just a fantastic map and you can take a look at his work at the at the hot link there it'll be in the slides i got a chance to meet teber toth at the international mountain cartography uh conference in lake switzerland and that was in 2007 or 2008 and tbr tolth did a presentation where he showed his workflow over the years and then finally uh turned off the powerpoint went to his wacom tablet and had photoshop up and just drew a set of ridges and then a set of blue lines that were the rivers running in the valley they just like squigglies coming together in little peaks and then got the airbrush out and started working in the shade relief and the whole image just popped up out of the map at that same conference i got to meet tony mayer which is one of the last living relief artists still doing model making and myself and nathaniel van kelsoe and tom patterson from the national park service and martin gamesh from national geographic got to visit his home and see his workshop where he actually makes these models so there's tom and and tony's daughter there it was a really really cool day first of course we had to have coffee with beautiful cakes and then he played us a piano concert up upstairs and then we went down into the basement to see his workshop and he showed us some of his old work too and how he kind of you know progressed over the years and how he would make these little models he was making a lot of models for swiss chocolate which is really fascinating so you would take the toppo cut it all out and then go ahead and just hand carve it into clay and then make a reverse mold of it right and then fix it up even more pour plaster get a plaster out of that and then go ahead and paint it and then maybe even add texture with little bushes and stuff that were like granules of green sand to represent the forests really fascinating right and there he is breaking a mold and showing us how he would pull it off some of his stuff was incredible he would take flights around the mountains in an aircraft taking pictures right also look at topographic maps and satellite images and aerial photos and then he would scale it all out so he knew exactly where the different ridges and where different features on the landscape would be in this case the iger norwand right this is a macro shot i took of one of his models and if it wasn't for the wall in the background it'd be hard to tell that it wasn't the real thing just incredible work here's his model of the matterhorn it's it's one of the most perfect uh renditions of the matterhorn that i've ever seen this one is actually in the alpine museum of switzerland in barron his workshop was a mess like most masters workshops but you really got to see the fine details of how he put it all together right here's another one of my macro shots of his mountain ranges this is the santis part of the ops in switzerland really fantastic stuff all right the glaciers are rendered in their actual location when he took the the photographs and because he dates all of his models they can actually use this to measure where the glaciers were compared to modern satellite imagery and aerial photos and then there we are in the bottom and i actually still have my little piece of chocolate and it's it was the plaster mold and this is the um the area that i was living in switzerland at the time and that's me and martin gamasha the national geographic very happy with our little gifts that tony meyer gave us so a local confessionary basically um contracted him to create a little relief model of the dougar c and and the area around zug where the um where the chocolate factory was and then they released this as like a hundred year anniversary of that chocolate factory chocolate blocks that were shaped like the the terrain and the area that that the factory was in so just a once in a lifetime opportunity for me so moving on to baran now baran is a master relief artist that you've probably seen his work he's also done a lot of work for national geographic he took the torch kind of um and went into doing even more relief for the bathymetry in the bottom of the oceans fantastic pieces of art that just show you know the the plate boundaries and and the trenches and so forth in the middle of the atlantic but he's really famous for his obliques so buran was commissioned by the national park service to do these incredible obliques that he would um he would pull off from aerial photos and and other topo maps and they would show entire national parks in one image kind of like this one so this is uh yellowstone national park uh including the lake and then including the tetons in the background when you look at it it's amazing that it all fits right here's his version of yosemite so these maps were produced by the national park service and they ended up on kiosks for sale they were part of official park documentation for years and years and and beran really had an eye for these things he could pull him off out of his head with very little to model it after and then here's his work for uh denali national park with the glaciers and this fits right into the lab we're going to start this week where we try to recreate the national park service map of denali a great link where you can go look at his work he also did abstract paintings he did ski resort maps a really huge body of work over the course of his life and he always signs it with that classic there it is right there buran right and you can see it it's like his own custom font which is his last name and then moving to the modern masters tom patterson tom patterson is a friend of mine he's the nicest guy you'll ever meet in your life he's now the the president of the nasis organization north american cartographic information society you can meet him at the conference the great thing about tom is he puts it all out there for everybody he shares all of his techniques and he's really interested in what young cartographers are doing and how they're learning he worked as the head of the national park service cartography bureau for years and years and years and then only recently retired but i've heard that he's still active in helping train up and coming cartographers in the office his work in the grand canyon and the canyonlands has really been featured you know quite a bit with the national park service and national geographic but he's really worked hard to create really fine texture and beautiful maps and integrate different techniques including oblique techniques so that you can see kind of a comparison of the sea mounts as they work their way up to hawaii beautiful all right his work in kenai ford's in glacier bay um some of the most beautiful maps of glacier glaciated areas that i've ever seen and when you zoom in and look at this stuff you can really see the attention to detail find bump maps to show the um the forested areas little sun hints inside the uh the lakes a very nice type set the whole nine yards right and you would expect nothing less from one of the premier organizations making maps in the country the park service right tom has shared all of his stuff on his great website shadyrelief.com you can go there and there are tutorials on how he's done things you can see maps there are free downloads there's an endless amount of material and i would highly recommend that you do go there and and take a look so what are we trying to do well we all start out now in this digital workflow with the dem that's our base right and in the standard default rendering as wide as the high ground and blacks are the low ground you can see the river basins and so forth in this image right here the first thing that we want to do is is add some some model of the light falling over the landscape to give us a hill shade right this though is sometimes the standard output when you see this come out of the the esri software or any gis software something is wrong there's been a miscalculation and we didn't get some of the inputs right most likely this is a um it has something to do with the projection of the dem and what happens is if you have your x y coordinates in a different unit then your z coordinates your elevation then you might get this really ugly charcoal looking relief this is something to be avoided right so you can change the some of the settings inside the the software to get a better looking relief and you might end up with something more like what we see on the top up here so that's kind of the standard might come out with a little bit of dark but then we'll take it and we'll reduce some of the contrast you can do some of this inside of gis other times it's best to take it out and put it into photoshop what we're trying to avoid is in the darkest valleys it going to absolute black because in that black area we're losing some of our detail right we're losing the little intricacies of the smaller valleys at the same thing on the other side of the spectrum is we want to avoid things that are completely whited out because at the very top end of the spectrum if the highlights are all the way white we're also losing detail so it's this fine compromise in between so what we want to produce is a realistic looking relief something like this kind of mix of shaded relief or hill shade hypsometric tint and then maybe breaking up that hypsometric tint with some kind of land cover or texture so that we don't have just simple color by elevation that's part of it but we break that up with a little bit of what the vegetation classes over the landscape are this is a nice little image of an area that we mapped for a lion conservation in senegal and you can really see that you do have some colors that represent the elevation as it gets lighter as we go to the top but then some of the darker greens are just representing the vegetation down in the river valleys we want to avoid this just straight color ramps that go from one color up to another color at the highlands that's the stock output we can do better right this is what we're trying to get after and do better so this week with our lab what we're going to be doing is trying to emulate a master we're going to take tom patterson's beautiful map of denali national park and we're going to do our very best to recreate it for this lab it's a longer lab could take you up to three weeks but there's going to be multiple components right there's going to be the gis component where we work through a bunch of models to produce our raster relief and i'm going to go over that in lab and then there's going to be the vector component where we do all of our dissolves and our labeling and get all of our vector layers ready to go and then we're going to do separate exports for raster and for vector the rasters will then be funneled into photoshop where we can do some really beautiful blending make those glaciers pop try and get the green colors from the vegetation layers that we have off of the glaciers and then we will have all the vectors go into illustrator where we can style the line work the polygons and do expert labeling we will put the raster underneath though as the base inside of illustrator and that allows us to have our beautiful relief with all of our fine vector work over the top of it we will actually be linking that placing that photoshop image into the illustrator document that helps us in a number of ways one if there's a mistake or we don't like the the colors we can just go back to the photoshop document open it up make edits save it and then the next time we open illustrator it'll just ask us there's been a change to one of your place documents would you like to update yes i would and it fixes it right there there's no need to replace it again it's automatically done it also allows us to to play with our relief in ways that would be harder to do if it was just a single image just one tiff so we will look at a number of different ways to do it there'll be the easy fast way just making it inside of arcgis which you can do and it looks all right but we can get so much better if we take the time to separate those layers out and then bring them into photoshop and use the power of the adobe software so here's some of tom's relief for this area i think it's a little bit oversaturated but who am i to critique it right but it looks really nice he's able to really pop the the highest mountain range in north america right but for us inside of uh inside of arcgis this is this is pretty close to one of the best we could get i found ways to tweak this a little bit and get it a little better but this is something that i've put together that's a hypsometric tinted land cover texture shader relief that's a mouthful right some of the problems i have with it is the green that shows up on the glaciers right i would rather not be able to see that and there are ways now that i've invented to get it off of the glaciers inside of just arc but you end up with multiple layers you've got your hill shade you've got a hypsometric tip you've got a rock layer that represents all the moraines you've got a glacier layer you've got a land cover layer that represents some of the textures that you see down in the lowlands and all those are just put together with simple transparencies inside of arcgis and then you export out one tiff which is your shaded relief and it looks pretty good you can make it look you know totally passable but if you want to take it to the next level what you're going to have to do is export each one of those layers with no transparency whatsoever bring them into photoshop as a big stack where everything lines up i'll show you how to do that this week and then play with the blending modes inside of photoshop that are going to let you get a look which makes the whole thing pop a lot better so here it is out of photoshop where you can see the glaciers look a little bit better i think there's still too much green in them i think i can do better nowadays but man look at the texture and so forth up here in the low lands and along the edges of the glacier right and the edges of the park so this is the kind of relief that we're hoping to get to one thing you'll learn doing high-end cartography is you're never done you can always go back i might go back a year later and see my relief and go i learned a few things this year that i want to try on that and if you have it in a photoshop document you can open that thing from a year ago and start working with some different you know techniques and then you can put it right back into your final map in illustrator and it will update the relief for you so you got version 200 right a map is never done so that's all i have for you today it's just a quick short and sweet one i hope you enjoyed this if you did give it a like go ahead and subscribe to the channel and i'll see you this week in lab thanks much

Channel: MapPractical

Views: 536

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Shaded Relief, Cartography, Imhof

Id: UkarRMaLeRU

Length: 23min 27sec (1407 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020