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11.G.x. Importing into Adobe Photoshop

Users of Photoshop can display GLOBE DEM and source/lineage files (GUNZIP decompressed) after renaming the file by adding a .raw extension. Importing the northwestern tile of GLOBE (file a10g) into Photoshop is presented as an example.

  • Copy the a10g (binary elevation data) files onto your hard drive. Rename the file a10g to a10g.raw. Copy the glelevpc.act file (Photoshop binary color palette file) into same disk location.
  • Start Photoshop. Select Open from the File pulldown menu and select Raw for Files of Type. Find the file on your disk and highlight it. Click OK. The Raw Options window is then displayed. Enter 10800 for Width and 4800 for Height. (The number of columns is always 10800. The number of rows is 4800 for tiles that cover 50o-90oN or 50o-90oS latitude and 6000 for tiles that cover 0o-50oN or 0o-50oS latitude.) Under Channels, make sure that the Count is 1. For Depth select 16 bits if importing a GLOBE DEM file. For Depth select 8 bits if importing a source/lineage file. For Byte Order select IBM PC. For Header keep 0 bytes. Click OK to open and display the image (which will probably initially display in black and white).
  • To display the image with one of the color palette files provided, select Image/Mode/8 Bits/Channel to change from 16-bit to a 8-bit data. This step is not necessary when importing source/lineage files from the source/data directory since these files contain 8-bit values.
  • Select Image/Mode/Indexed Color to change from grayscale to indexed color.
  • Select Image/Mode/Color Table. The Color Table window is then displayed. Click on the Load button. Select the glelevpc.act palette file and click on the Open button. Then click on the OK button in the Color Table window. The data should now be displayed with the color palette file. The zero and negative values are all displayed as black.

Note: GLOBE DEM and source/lineage binary color palette files are provided for Macintosh (glelepal.mac, glsrcpal.mac) and Microsoft Windows (glelevpc.act, glelevpc.pal, glsrcpc.act, glsrcpc.pal) machines. The *.act files are both generated by Photoshop. The displays from both color palette files should be the same.

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