A hillshade, or shaded relief, is a technique to visualize elevation data in order to make it photorealistic for presentation as a map. This capability is part of GDAL and is available in QGIS in two different ways. It is a tool in the Terrain Analysis menu under the Raster menu and it is also an algorithm in the Processing Toolbox.
You will need to download a DEM from https://geospatialpython.googlecode.com/files/dem.zip.
Unzip the file named dem.asc
and place it in your /qgis_data/rasters
directory.
In this recipe, we will load the DEM layer and run the Hillshade
processing algorithm against it. To do this, we need to perform the following steps:
Start QGIS.
From the Plugins menu, select Python Console.
Import the
processing
module:import processing
Load and validate the layer:
rasterLyr = QgsRasterLayer("/qgis_data/rasters/dem.asc", "Hillshade") rasterLyr.isValid()
Run the
Hillshade
algorithm, providing the algorithm name, layer reference...