Creating a color hillshade

In this example, we’ll combine previous techniques to combine our terrain hillshade from Chapter 8, Python and Elevation Data, with the color classification that we used on the LIDAR. For this example, we’ll need the ASCII Grid DEMs named dem.asc and relief.asc that we used in the previous chapter.

We’ll create a colorized DEM and a hillshade and then use PIL to blend them together for an enhanced elevation visualization. The code comments will guide you through the example, as many of these steps are already familiar to you.

So, let’s dive into this code to understand how it generates a hillshade image by blending a DEM with a shaded relief background. The code uses the PIL for image manipulation and GDAL for geospatial operations:

1. First, we import the necessary libraries. GDAL is for geospatial operations, and PIL is for image processing:

   from osgeo import gdal_array as gd
   try:
       import Image...