Turning satellite imagery into wall art • Hacker News Board

Re: Turning satellite imagery into wall art

#31

Post by madaxe_again » Sat, Aug 28, 2021, 10:32 AM UTC

oleh wrote: post #27

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.

Re: Turning satellite imagery into wall art

#32

Post by Miiko » Sun, Aug 29, 2021, 7:14 AM UTC

changoplatanero wrote: post #19

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.

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. ;)

Re: Turning satellite imagery into wall art

#33

Post by mparr4 » Mon, Aug 30, 2021, 9:08 AM UTC

sillycross wrote: post #4

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.

Re: Turning satellite imagery into wall art

#34

Post by mparr4 » Mon, Aug 30, 2021, 9:15 AM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #3

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 hav…

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!)

Re: Turning satellite imagery into wall art

#35

Post by mparr4 » Mon, Aug 30, 2021, 9:20 AM UTC

changoplatanero wrote: post #19

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...

Re: Turning satellite imagery into wall art

#36

Post by sillycross » Mon, Aug 30, 2021, 11:17 PM UTC

mparr4 wrote: post #33

sillycross wrote: post #4

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 gett…

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!