Blending the colors in Photoshop manually seems very tedious.<p>The open source Enblend/Enfuse, which ships as part of the open source panorama stitching software Hugin, does it automatically and seamlessly.<p><a href="http://enblend.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://enblend.sourceforge.net/</a>
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,<p><a href="https://twitter.com/geo_spatialist" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/geo_spatialist</a>
There is a video detailing the process<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AkaCAv2TSk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AkaCAv2TSk</a>
see also felicette.<p><a href="https://github.com/plant99/felicette" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/plant99/felicette</a>
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.
If you just want some nice (public domain) art to hang on your wall:<p><a href="https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eros/science/earth-art" rel="nofollow">https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eros/science/earth-art</a>
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:<p><a href="https://youtu.be/m0fB4wrvgeY" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/m0fB4wrvgeY</a>
Reminder that also the amazing "Tilt45" imagery exists:<p><a href="https://jsfiddle.net/3tuprz7n/" rel="nofollow">https://jsfiddle.net/3tuprz7n/</a>
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.
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'd love to request an area (USVI, St. John specifically).<p>These look great. I love the insights on the tuning process and it's nice to know it isn't just a lazy cropping.
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).<p>Unfortunately the explanation for that step is only a few sentences..
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/<p>The images are already blended so much of the work is done.