{"id":4299,"date":"2018-10-28T12:43:32","date_gmt":"2018-10-28T12:43:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/?p=4299"},"modified":"2019-04-14T17:47:19","modified_gmt":"2019-04-14T17:47:19","slug":"creating-and-using-custom-arcgis-pro-symbology-part-2-image-preparation-and-processing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/?p=4299","title":{"rendered":"CREATING AND USING CUSTOM ARCGIS PRO SYMBOLOGY \u2013 PART 2: Image Preparation and Processing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is the second part in a series of posts on my journey to create custom symbology in ArcGIS Pro. Inspired by John Nelson<\/a>\u00a0this post is primarily a reminder to myself about how I did it.\u00a0 Actually this whole blog is my personal notes made public (so yes you can do this differently and achieve the same results), I’ve done on more than one occasion a Google Search for a solution only to find a post I did about it ages back…. doh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So you have the kit because you read my previous post<\/a>, so now what?\u00a0 Well we need to do some drawing and painting!\u00a0 \u00a0Then we will process those drawings by scanning them modifying them in a image editor (like GIMP or Adobe Photoshop Elements) and saving them in a nice and organised way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The next part of this blog series will deal specifically with each symbol type (lines and points) and I will also cover watercolour swatches I’ve created.\u00a0 This post will get your drawings and sketches to an image editor ready for use in ArcGIS Pro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Inspiration doesn’t have to come from specific texts or Cartography books (but it helps)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

There’s two steps to my process (you can of course do it differently!), first read some books and get some inspiration.\u00a0 The I have a scrap page which I start doing test runs on symbology and lines a bit like the image below…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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doodles can turn into something more digital later…<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Once I’m happy with something I will add it to my grid paper I’ve created which you can download here (below).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Symbology Grids<\/a>Download<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Don’t be afraid to experiment<\/strong>, don’t think it’s not good enough!\u00a0 Lots of people say they can’t draw, what I think they mean is they’re not confident enough to draw for other people.\u00a0 Besides which some mistakes or badly drawn things might look just right in the correct context.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Some look okay, some I’m embarrassed about to be honest, I’m trying to learn not to care too deeply about what others think!<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

So we have a paper grid of hand drawn symbols (no you don’t need to till them up).\u00a0 Notice I’ve used white paper for this the whiter and cleaner the paper the better I can edit them later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now I would scan them or take a photo, just be warned that take a photo you need really good light, no shadows and try and make sure them are photo’d flat so you don’t have distortions to fix later.\u00a0 \u00a0I recommend scanning them if you can as this will keep things nice and consistent.\u00a0 As a rule I scan at 200dpi or more as a minimum, I do scan as colour even if black and white scans just so I can choose later what’s done with the image also not all pens are black!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I scan the whole A4 page (sorry people from USA we’re metric around here!), and it will look like this in Adobe Photoshop Elements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ready to process!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Step 1: Duplicate the layer\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Step 2: Delete the background layer<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Step 3: Use the crop tool and choose your symbology<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Step 4: Use the Magic Wand selection Tool (uncheck contiguous and adjust the tolerance to adjust) to select all the white space on the image.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Step 5: Go to Edit menu and select ‘Cut’ or use the keyboard shortcut ‘Ctrl-X’, now you have a small image with a transparent background! Use the crop tool again to adjust the image size to your requirements (I tend to crop just to the image, but some like to make it precisely square)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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filename “draft_v1_v2_final_final_v0.png”<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Step 6: Save in a folder with a nice file name but save as a PNG file which supports transparent backgrounds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So that’s it! The next blog post in this series (coming soon) will take you through symbology a types (lines or points) and show you how we get it working in ArcGIS Pro.\u00a0 I will also do a separate blog in the series for coloured scans of my watercolours swatches…<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second part in a series of posts on my journey to create custom symbology in ArcGIS Pro. Inspired by John Nelson\u00a0this post is primarily a reminder to myself about how I did it.\u00a0 Actually this whole blog is my personal notes made public (so yes you can do this differently and achieve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89,249,114,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-adobe","category-arcgispro","category-cartography","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4319,"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4299\/revisions\/4319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.geoplanit.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}