Hillshade (Shaded Relief, GeoTIFF)

Hillshade is an image in which the terrain reads through its shadows: slopes facing an imaginary sun are light, those turned away are dark. The technique is older than computers, but in digital cartography it remains the clearest way to show mountains, valleys and gullies without contour lines or color ramps.

Hillshade goes underneath a map — topographic, hiking, designer. It does not argue with the content: roads, water and labels stay readable, while the terrain stops being flat. In geomorphology the same picture is used to make out landforms that get lost in vegetation and buildings on a satellite image.

Our hillshade is computed from the global Copernicus DEM GLO-30 terrain model with a step of about 30 meters. The light is multidirectional: it arrives from four sides and is blended, so slopes turned away from a single "sun" no longer become flat black patches, and small landforms — gullies, terraces, washouts — stay visible whichever way they face. The source sits 45 degrees above the horizon, the angle at which terrain reads most naturally. How strongly the shading shows through under the map is set by the opacity slider at export time. Coverage is global, including high latitudes.

The output is a georeferenced GeoTIFF: a single brightness band from 0 to 255 in WGS84 (EPSG:4326), with the mandatory Copernicus attribution embedded in the file metadata. You do not have to download the hillshade separately — you can switch it on as a background under the vector map when exporting to PDF, SVG or PNG. If there is no terrain data for the area, the service says so honestly instead of handing you a blank gray picture.