[Qgis-user] Problems with Natural Earth images

[Alex Mandel]

On 12/12/2013 06:18 AM, Shriramana Sharma wrote:
> Thanks for your replies. Please see below for my further questions.
> 
> On Thu, Dec 12, 2013 at 9:25 AM, Alex Mandel <tech_dev at wildintellect.com> wrote:
>>
>>> http://www.naturalearthdata.com/forums/topic/where-do-i-get-water-image-separately/
>>
>> You'll have to make it yourself by grabbing the vector layer with oceans
>> and overlaying that on top of whatever land you want, then style it
>> yourself.
> 
> Is it possible to get the same effect as seen in the official
> downloads with water i.e it's somewhat lighter near the shores but
> blends to a constant blue tint (i.e. not bathymetric) for the oceans.
> 

Yes that is a cartography trick, you can do it several ways, one is a
gradient starting at the edge, the other is a series of one sided
buffers with a gradient of colors applied to look like a seamless gradient.

>>> http://www.naturalearthdata.com/forums/topic/border-thickness-problem-in-plain-cross-blend-hypso/
>>>
>> Was that a compressed png? did you try an uncompressed one? are you sure
>> you kept the same image resolution? Did you try loading it in QGIS and
>> doing a gdal_translate. FYI JPEG might come out better but why can't you
>> just keep it a tiff?
> 
> Even if I do it to a TIFF the problem remains the same. As I pointed
> out in the post above, even the official download page shows a blocked
> strait of Gibraltar!
> 

Which resolution image are you using and what scale are you trying to
make a map at? Natural Earth is only intended for GLOBAL to whole
Country/Region scales, anything more zoomed in and you'll need to go
another route.

Thanks,
Alex