d.shade(1grass)

📦
version 8.5.0 · 10 versions
, in alpine 3.24, ubuntu stonking

💅 d.shade — the GRASS User's Manual moment

okay so bestie, imagine you have a relief map and a pretty color map and you want them together, right? That's literally what d.shade does. It's giving "drape a color raster over a shaded relief or aspect map" energy and honestly? iconic. ✨

KEYWORDS: display, elevation, relief, hillshade, visualization — iykyk

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

d.shade
d.shade --help
d.shade [-n] shade=name color=name  [brighten=integer]   [--help]
[--verbose]  [--quiet]  [--ui]

🎀 Flags

  • -n — Respect NULL values while drawing. yes queen, leave the NULLs alone 🙈
  • --help — Print usage summary. when u forget how things work (me fr)
  • --verbose — Verbose module output. it tells u everything 💀
  • --quiet — Quiet module output. shhh 🤫
  • --ui — Force launching GUI dialog. for when clicking > typing

🌸 Parameters

  • shade=name [required] — Name of shaded relief or aspect raster map
  • color=name [required] — Name of raster to drape over relief raster map. Typically, this raster is elevation or other colorful raster
  • brighten=integer — Percent to brighten
    • Options: -99-99
    • Default: 0

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

d.shade will drape a color raster map over a shaded relief map. In place of shaded relief, literally any raster map can be used — including aspect or slope, no gatekeeping. The color raster map is usually an elevation raster map with a colorful color table (as opposed to a gray scale color table). But fr, any raster map can be used, even categorical raster maps. slay.

The advantage of this module is that it allows visualizing the shaded map without a need to create a new raster which would combine both. Comparing to creating shaded relief as semi-transparent overlay on the color raster map, this module gives result with more saturated colors. more saturation = more main character energy 🔥

The input for this module can be created for example using r.slope.aspect or r.relief.

💜 NOTES 💜

Refer to the d.his help page for more details; d.shade is simply a frontend to that module. basically it's the cute lil face, d.his is the whole brain 🧠💅

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

In this example, the aspect map in the North Carolina sample dataset is used to hillshade the elevation map:

g.region raster=aspect -p
d.mon wx0
d.shade shade=aspect color=elevation

Figure: A detail of raster created by applying shading effect of aspect to elevation raster map from North Carolina dataset elevation map

In this next example, a shaded relief raster map is created and used to create a colorized hillshade:

g.region raster=elevation
r.relief input=elevation output=elevation_shaded_relief
d.mon wx1
d.shade shade=elevation_shaded_relief color=elevation

Interesting visualizations can be created using different color tables for elevation raster map, for example using haxby color table. 🍓 haxby is the vibe tbh

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

  • d.his
  • g.pnmcomp
  • r.shade
  • r.slope.aspect
  • r.relief
  • wxGUI 3D viewer (NVIZ)

🫶 AUTHORS 🫶

Unknown; updated to GRASS 5.7 by Michael Barton

SOURCE CODE

Available at: d.shade source code (history)

Latest change: Monday Dec 15 16:57:16 2025 in commit: dd421a0dcdc853499c1b261152520e058b20f1ea

Main index | Display index | Topics index | Keywords index | Graphical index | Full index

© 2003-2026 GRASS Development Team, GRASS 8.5.0 Reference Manual ✨

and that's the whole page bestie — no cap, that's d.shade(1grass) from the GRASS 8.5.0 era, so go drape some rasters and be the visualization icon u were born to be 💖🎀🦋

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