Creating a hillshade with ArcGIS Pro’s raster functions is spectacularly simple…but also spectacularly fun. There’s a sense of magic behind a simple button press. Whole landscapes reveal themselves. Data transforms into information. Geography becomes art. All that.
So if a single button press is so rewarding, what’s the harm in a few more button presses? None, that’s how much.
Here’s how you can conjure your own fully custom multidirectional hillshading in ArcGIS Pro. Then get crazy and do a chromatic hillshade. Then get ridiculous and apply hypsometric tinting.
With a digital elevation model in hand, you can use the hillshade raster function to participate in the joy of algorithmically converting an elevation surface into an illuminated terrain. Just magic. But why choose just one angle? You can create any number of hillshade layers at various angles…
…and use Soft Light blend mode to merge them together into your own tenderly crafted multidirectional hillshade.
Or, if you prefer, you could use a darkening blend mode like Multiply.
Say, why stick with the default black-to-white hillshade color gradient? What if you gave the hillshade layers black-to-red, black-to-green, and black-to-blue gradients?
Then you could use the Screen blend mode to combine them into a trippy colorized hillshade. Now instead of just tones to illustrate terrain, we can give our brains a bit of color to help tease out the angular characteristics of the landscape.
Then if you’d like to add a bit of depth to this terrain, drag up the original elevation layer and give it a Soft Light blend mode to hypsometrically tint the lower and higher elevations.
Because why not? There’s a million different ways you can take command of your cartographic terrain adventures to make your map carry the message it needs. Try it out, have fun. But be warned: terrain conjuring is a slippery slope and you may find yourself wholly consumed by the delicate powers of throwing shade.
Happy terrain mapping! John
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