Favorite Uses for Raster Design: Cropping Aerial Imagery

 

Yesterday, I posted about Merging Tiled Images using Autodesk Raster Design.

Cropping Aerial Photography

Now that I have one image, I often only need a portion of it. This is especially true with road design projects- I just need an image that covers the road and some right of way area on either side.

You can make regular shapes, but I will use the Crop>Polygonal Region option to make a custom shape.

The image is cropped.

If you don’t like the black pieces, you could use a rectangular region, but keep in mind that black takes less time to load than detailed aerial imagery.

Circle can be useful as well if you need to focus on a specific radius.

Again, I’ll want to save this image with a new name and produce a world file. The major benefit to doing your image manipulation in Raster Design over an image editing program is that Raster Design understands that you need to keep things in the right location.

Working with these photos reminds me of a post I wrote about Conceptual Road Design Ideas and using imagery to complement planning exhibits.

James will talk about creating exhibits for planning and conceptual design  in our upcoming CE News webcast on June 28, 2012 called: Planning and Environmental Assessment with BIM for Infrastructure.

Comments

[Jason]

The aerial image I often use is .sid format. A high resoloution image that I bring into Civil 3D through the Map 3D data connect. Do you know how i can crop this image in Civil 3D or perhaps with raster? The image covers the entire city so I would like to crop it to my work area.

Thanks

[Dana Probert, P.E.]

Yes! You can crop SID images, and even save them as a new file type (jpg, etc). I will write up a post tonight and publish it for tomorrow morning.