Nick Hopton said:This was the best I could get,
Looks very nice.
Quoted message said:has anyone managed to do better?
Better in what way? It really depends what you want exactly.
As a flat satellite image it's great, but not knowing the
area it just looks like a random patchwork of fields and
woods to me. It would make more sense as a conventional map,
but then of course it wouldn't look so good.
Then there's the issue of 3D. Having played around with the
Memory Map demo I'd say that produces much better looking
results, if of course you want to view a walk in 3D rather
than a flat aerial view. But 3D can bring it's own problems
- when walking in very steep terrain, unless you view from a
fairly high view, parts of the walk may be hidden. Of course
the higher you go the less 3D it looks, but my preference
would definitely be for a 3D view.
Currently I can display my walks in 3D using Anquet Maps,
but of course they aren't aerial photos. I find that the 3D
rendering gives a much better impression of a walk, even on
conventional maps, and a conventional map is much easier to
understand even if it doesn't look so good. A bit of time
experimenting with the angle of view and the light shading
usually produces good results.
A couple of other points about your walk. Firstly, I can't
tell where it starts from or in which direction you went.
That light blue bit sticking out near the top right could be
your start point, but it could also be a GPS error. I can't
see any obvious road leading there, but that's one of the
problems with aerial photos, roads can often be invisible.
The other thing I find odd is the height colouring of the
track. This doesn't seem remotely logical to me. My brain
instictively tells me that the blue and green are low and
the yellow and magenta are high, which the key tells me is
wrong, but even after looking at the key I find it hard to
visualise because the colours seem wrong.
Most colour systems follow the rainbow colours - blue,
green, yellow, orange, red. Yours do too, but they seem to
be in reverse.
Psychologically blue seems low because it represents the
sea, green is next up, representing fertile grassland, then
yellow as you get higher up (mountain grass is often
yellowish), then brown for the hills, then grey for the
higher rocky mountains then white for the snow on the top.
This is the colouring adopted in most atlases (not quite the
rainbow but close) and I've read that they use those colours
for pretty much those reasons, even though they don't
correspond to actual ground colours in some parts of the
world. Psychologically they seem right.
Your colouring (I don't know if you can change it) seems to
use a different logic, the logic of temperature. Red being
the hottest colour is lowest and the colours get
progressively colder the higher up you go, which makes sense
in that it usually gets colder higher up, but it still
doesn't look right to me. Also the magenta bugs me (I hate
that colour). Technically I suppose that represents ultra-
violet and hence is at the end of the spectrum beyond blue,
but magenta looks closer to red to my eyes, I see it as a
warm colour rather than a cold one.
Anyway, it's up to you whether you're happy with the colours
or not, I just thought I'd share my thoughts on the issue.
Personally I find that a 3D view gives a much better idea of
the elevation involved in a walk.
I'd post an example or two of Anquet and MM 3D but I fear
that the OS police would chuck me in prison and throw away
the key... ;-)
But still, your image does look very nice.
Paul
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