![]() In ArcGIS, you have a few fancy ways to symbol your vector layers. Interfaces that you might recognize from software like Inkscape, Photoshop, Gimp and others alike. You can select your colours using many different interfaces. Colour Picker MenuĬontrolling color is a very important deal for a cartographer and QGIS allow you to control it like the professional you are. This gives you the opportunity to make more “artistic” things without the need to go post-processing in a design software. You can also use blending modes in the print composer items, allowing you to combine them with other items and textures. Hypsometry original colors Hypsometry colors paled by transparent hill shade Hypsometry original colors with the hill shade using QGIS multiply blending But in QGIS, you can keep the strength of the original colors by using the multiply mode in the hill shade layer. In ArcGIS, you can only control the layer transparency, and the result is always a bit pale. I had the chance to play around while trying to answer this question.Ī very common application for this functionality is when you want to add shadows to simulate the relief by putting a hill shade on top of other layers. It’s not easy to grasp how can this be of any use for cartography before you try it yourself. Check this page to know more about the math behind each one and this image for some examples Besides the normal mode, QGIS offers 12 other blending modes: Lighten, Screen, Dodge, Darken, Multiply, Burn, Overlay, Soft light, Hard light, Difference, and Subtract. At layer or at feature level, you can control how they will “interact” with other layers or features below. The ability to combine layers the way you would do in almost any design/photo editing software. You can even set transparency in colors by using the RGBA function in an expression! How sweet can that be? □ This includes annotations (like the ones in the image above), labels and composers items. Notice that in QGIS you can set transparency at color level everywhere (or almost everywhere) there is a color to select. You can say that this is being overrated, but check the differences in the following images. ![]() In QGIS on the other end, you can set transparency at layer level, feature/symbol level, and color level. That is, either it’s all transparent, or it’s not… Yes, but… you can only set transparency at the layer level. “ArcGIS have transparency! It’s in the Display tab, in the layer’s properties dialog!” Warning: For those of you that use ArcGIS exclusively, some of this features may catch you by surprise. So here’s my short list of QGIS functionalities that I’m longing for. For those of you that use ArcGIS exclusively, some of this features may catch you by surprise. I’m using top shelf ArcGIS Desktop Advanced and I’m struggling to do very basic tasks that simply are nonexistent in ArcGIS. I would expect the same have happened in ArcGIS side, but, as far I can see, it didn’t. Since then, a lot have happened in the QGIS world, and I have been watching it closely. At that time, I missed some (or even many?) ArcGIS features, but I was willing to accept it in exchange for the freedom of the Open Source philosophy. I used it until version 9.3.1 and then decided to move away (toward the light) into QGIS (1.7.4 I think). There was a time when I have used ArcGIS on the regular basis. I’m willing to attend one of those because being recently and temporally forced to use ArcGIS Desktop again (don’t ask!), I really really really miss QGIS in many ways. This is something I would say at an anonymous QGIS user therapy group. “Hello, my name is Alexandre, and I have been using… QGIS“ ![]() It’s time for a QGIS user perspective, so bare with me on this (a bit) long, totally and openly biased post. Since many of those articles are created from an ArcGIS user point of view, they invariably lead to biased observations on QGIS lack of features. (aka Features that ArcGIS Desktop users might not know that exists)įrom time to time, I read articles comparing ArcGIS vs QGIS. ![]()
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