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Earth At Night X-Ray Vision with ArcGIS Online Blend Modes

By John Nelson

Blend modes give me the sort of feeling like when I was a kid and all these grown-ups were doing this confounded separated finger trick and I know they aren’t really ripping their finger off but for crying out loud how are they doing it then I crack the code and the whole world becomes at once, yes, a little smaller, but also ripe with new wonder at the tangible accessibility of illusion and dexterous slight of hand.

I’m sure you feel exactly the same way.

0:00 Meaningless chit chat.

0:15 How to get to the Map viewer Beta.

0.30 Setting basemap to (daytime) World Imagery (which, eh-hem, has been recently saturated and bumpified).

0:38 Adding a tiled-up NASA Earth at Night layer from Living Atlas.

1:45 Applying the Overlay blend mode.

2:30 Beholding the marvel of an x-ray vision perspective of an Earth at Night.

3:35 Changing a map’s background color, yes!

4:05 Back to rambling about how cool it looks. What a time to be alive, etc.

Love, John

 

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Chris Bruce(@cbruce)
July 23, 2020 12:49 pm

Very cool! It even distracted my kid from playing Minecraft for a few moments. Now the big question that’s on everyone’s mind – when is blending coming to ArcGIS Pro?

Guenter Doerffel(@gdoerffel)
July 28, 2020 7:13 am
Reply to  Chris Bruce

First of all: John, another great piece of advice! Like!
And for Chris: Blending in Pro can be done with Python – as there are nice implementations of blending available forl the Python Image Library (PIL). I’ve got a Raster Function Template that does it for two RGB(A) Raster Layers (but Raster Layers only). Similar a simple Alpha chanel RFT can help you to just fade a raster a little different than just setting it to transparent.
Let me know if you are interested …
Guenter