Color Relief / Hypsometric Tint (GeoTIFF)

Hypsometric tinting is a way of showing relief with color, familiar from paper atlases: lowlands are green, middle elevations yellow-brown, peaks white. Every elevation mark has its own color on the chosen scale, and the terrain reads at a glance, without contour lines and labels.

Such a base is taken when the map has to explain the landscape: a topographic sheet, a poster or an atlas, an illustration for geology and hydrology, teaching material. Roads, rivers and labels sit well on top of hypsometric tinting — the color works as a background without arguing with the vector layers.

The raster is built from the global Copernicus GLO-30 elevation model with a step of about 30 meters. Six elevation colour scales are available; the default is the soft natural one with light shading, the rest are chosen in the settings. The shading gives volume, as on classic shaded relief maps; for a stronger effect a hillshade is multiplied on top of the tint.

The output is a georeferenced GeoTIFF that lands in its place in a GIS right away. Where there is no elevation data (over the sea, for example), the pixels stay transparent, so the base can be freely laid over other layers. Using Copernicus data requires crediting the source — the attribution is given on the format page.