Adobe Photoshop is the graphic arts industry standard software for raster image manipulation. Cartographers can also use Photoshop to create effective colored shaded relief for maps.

One important advantage in using Photoshop to create shaded relief is that of familiarity. Most cartographers and graphic artists have Photoshop on their desktop and are skilled in using it for working with images. It is an extremely powerful image-editing tool and a skilled cartographer can make many enhancements to a shaded relief map image once it is rendered.

Grayscale to Height preparation (optional)
To create relief in Photoshop you need first to get a grayscale to height image into the program. I will not go into details for this tutorial, I will simply use a grayscale image created using MacDEM, a remarkably powerful yet simple application that is a vital part of many a cartographer’s toolbox (available at http://www.treeswallow.com/macdem/ ).
There are numerous other ways to bring in digital elevation data including opening some data files directly into Photoshop in RAW format. See Tom Patterson’s excellent tutorials on working with GTOPO 30 data for an example: http://www.nacis.org/cp/cp28/gtopo.html.

Download pdf Photoshop 6 tutorial: How to Create Basic Colored Shaded Relief