Turning satellite imagery into wall art
ramblemaps.comBlending the colors in Photoshop manually seems very tedious.
The open source Enblend/Enfuse, which ships as part of the open source panorama stitching software Hugin, does it automatically and seamlessly.
To be honest, PS’s inbuilt merge and stitch is pretty damn good - I use it on astrophotography outputs where I need to match subtly different processes between subframes of a mosaic. If there are flaws, they’re not ones my eyes can see.
I stumbled across a similar project that uses digital elevation maps and lidar data to add 3d effect to old maps, the results are quite interesting,
https://twitter.com/geo_spatialist There is a video detailing the process
Geospatialist is amazing! I'm waiting for more maps of Europe. I'm particularly interested in a map of the old Austro Hungarian empire because of my family heritage. I wish custom orders were accepted.
see also felicette.
When I was a google intern in 2013 I downloaded the raw google maps satellite images for all of the United States. I stitched it together into one giant high resolution image. The plan was to get it printed big enough to cover an entire wall. That ended up being too expensive though and nothing ever happened.
I wrote another post that is both an homage to Google Earth and an illustration of how these maps differ:
If Google Earth Were Designed For Your Wall: https://ramblemaps.com/if-google-earth-were-designed-for-wal...
A couple of decades ago I was toying with stitching too, tring to combine high-resolution topo maps to cover all California. That was when I learned that the Earth is not flat, after my attempt failed. ;)
Too expensive for you or for Google?
For me!
If you just want some nice (public domain) art to hang on your wall:
Here is a direct link if you want to search stuff on a map.
https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/
The datasets you pick from can be a bit confusing unless you click the (!) icon next to the names to figure out what they are.
I have mostly used it for looking at old reconnaissance satellite images from the 70's and 80's. I posted some directions here and a image from a satellite.
Kind of related. I used similar data to produce an Augmented Reality version of the (almost) entire Hawaiian Island chain with both topography and bathymetry:
Reminder that also the amazing "Tilt45" imagery exists:
Looks nice! I noticed that at the bottom of the page there is an e-mail sign up box that says: "Don't See Your Favorite Place? Know when we release new maps." Now I know e-mail sign up forms usually come canned in a bit of javascript, but it sure seems like it would help if people signing up could also include a place they would like to see. I'm not in the market for this kind of thing but I was hoping they would have the San Francisco Bay Area on there. Santa Cruz and the Monterey Bay would be cool too. Definitely want the bathymetry on those ones. I thought the bathymetry was a nice touch.
They have it: https://ramblemaps.com/san-francisco-bay-area-map
Oh cool! I guess I scrolled too fast or something. Thanks.
It’s actually a custom form (not canned) and we had previously had an additional field for area of interest but it lowered the conversion rate of the form so we dropped it.
Getting emails is more important to our business than knowing where folks want to see. We also don’t want folks to have the expectation that we’ll make a map because they requested it. Each map takes a lot of work and in our experience requesters rarely become purchasers.
(Also, we see the page you submitted your email on, which is often a search query that was not successful, which tells us what you were looking for!)
It would be even more awesome if a terrain elevation map was milled into the wood before painting/printing! Definitely would buy, especially from Big Island or Kaua’i! :-)
I’ve seen it done the other way around - print out a base layer, and then stack with thin layers of foam board following the countour lines - I can’t remember where I saw it, I think maybe a friend’s hobby project - but they’d done this with an ordnance survey map (they’d actually glued a whole map to foam and had then cut out along the contours), and it looked amazingly cool.
I also recall being at a RAF base in the late 90’s and being amazed by a tool they had in their map and chart division - little blow-moulder that would make a sheet of relief terrain from a DEM - as I guess that was easier at the time than getting pilots to look at digital models.
I'd love to request an area (USVI, St. John specifically).
These look great. I love the insights on the tuning process and it's nice to know it isn't just a lazy cropping.
so cool; seeing the evolution of the piece and thought put into the process, from sentinel source image to wall-worthy art, adds a lot
I had an idea to sort of automate this process or even a user aided wizard as a product but never to round to the mvp. Still an ok idea I think as satellite imagery on wall is great talking point. It can be beautiful, dramatic, always changing so makes for sets of images showing changes etc
It seems like the last "Improving the color" step is what gives most of the atheistic effects (by comparing the second last picture and the final result on the top).
Unfortunately the explanation for that step is only a few sentences..
That step could certainly be its own post of greater length than this one.
For this particular map it involves separate curve adjustment layers for the water and land. We generally increase the steepness of the curve (increasing contrast) and then adjust individual color channels to get the color balance right. We also do some localized burning (darkening) in areas where pushing the curve resulted in some pixels getting too bright.
I’d love to put together a post with lots of pictures and details about how we do this. It is motivating knowing there is an audience for it.
Thanks for the explanation! When I read the article, I felt the last step is much more complex than it is said. It seems like you confirmed this point.
I will be very excited to see a post on how these aesthetic improvements are made!
Bump the contrast and saturation and you'll be pretty close I reckon.
As someone who don't know how to use Photoshop, it's interesting to learn (as you said) that, most the difference is only contrast and saturation.
The final image just looked so much better than the second last one for me.
Photoshop gives you a lot of tools to tweak beyond simple contrast and saturation sliders. The curves UI has been in it in some form since very early versions in the 90s. It lets you dial in a transfer function for each color channel (or luminance) as a bezier curve. The UI shows you a histogram so you can easily understand what's going on with the actual numerical values, avoid clipping, etc. There's plenty of smart tools in the more recent versions too.
Another simple but subtle advantage is you can do these corrections in a perceptual or near perceptual color space like CIELAB, rather than simple RGB. Particularly when you're pushing saturation this gives more natural looking outcomes.
For the lucky guys/gals from NZ, there are high quality cloud free arial images freely available from linz. In particular check out basemaps.linz.govt.nz/
The images are already blended so much of the work is done.
Nice. Is anyone doing the same but with more focus on Europe? Lake Geneva or Lake Garda with the surrounding mountains would make a nice scene.
Love it but they don’t have any of my fav areas and while I’ll submit a request - anyone know any similar websites that I can look at?