Loading a raster layer
The QGSRasterLayer API provides a convenient, high-level interface to raster data. To use this interface, we must load a layer into QGIS. The API allows you to work with a layer without adding it to the map. In this way, we'll load layer and then add it to the map.
Getting ready
As with the other recipes in this book, you need to create a directory called qgis_data in our root or user directory, which provides a short pathname without spaces. This setup will help prevent any frustrating errors that result from path-related issues on a given system. In this recipe, and the others, we'll use a Landsat satellite image of the Mississippi Gulf Coast, which you can download from https://geospatialpython.googlecode.com/files/SatImage.zip.
Unzip the SatImage.tif and SatImage.tfw files and place them in a directory named rasters
within your qgis_data directory.
How to do it...
Now, we'll go through how to load a raster layer and then step by step add it to the...
