I’ve been at LizardTech for almost five years now, and one thing that has always been (pleasingly) surprising to me is how much people like the plastic lizards we include with our software and give away at events. These little guys have been all over the world, and are so popular that we order them 50,000 at a time.

Last year at the ESRI International User Conference in San Diego we had a contest for you to “Show Us Your Lizards.” It was a great success; the winner brought in 31 unique LizardTech lizards from over the years. Everyone seemed to enjoy it, but the only problem was not everyone knew about it before the show started. Lots of people I spoke to at our booth said “Oh, I wish I would have known. I have dozens of them at home!”

Well, now’s your chance, because we’re doing it again. Take a look at our new contests for this year’s user conference, and show us your lizards this August in San Diego!

About 250 LizardTech users took our customer satisfaction survey in April. I wanted to thank you for taking the time to tell us about how you use our products and what we can do to improve. Ninety-eight percent of you said you’d recommend LizardTech’s products to a colleague, and as a product manager that makes me about as happy as can be.

Some of you said you’d be willing to talk to me in a bit more depth about what you’d like to see in future versions and things LizardTech can do to make your life easier. I’ll be starting to make calls in early June, so thanks in advance for your help.

Last time, we talked about despeckling. Another popular workflow with GeoExpress 7 uses two new features: output tiling and decoding.

Lots of customers have massive SID images that they need to chop up into smaller tiles and decode out to TIFF. In prior versions of GeoExpress, you could use a series of command line tools to do this, but of course this was unwieldy.

Here’s how easy it is to do in GeoExpress 7:

1. Add the file(s) you want to work with to the Images tab of the job list.
2. Select Image Crop… from the Tools menu. The Image Crop dialog appears.
3. In the Output Tiling section, choose how many rows and columns you want to divide your image into and click OK.
4. Now, just choose “GeoTIFF” as your output format (use the drop-down menu on the main interface) and click Encode Selected Images.

In no time, you’ll have a series of GeoTIFF tiles created from your original SID image.

Many customers have requested an easy way to be notified when updates to LizardTech products are available. Today we launch a new RSS feed specifically for product updates at http://www.lizardtech.com/files/rss/updates.xml.

By subscribing, you’ll know when patches and new versions of LizardTech software are available.

You can view all of LizardTech’s RSS feeds at http://www.lizardtech.com/company/rss.php. Also, the LizardTech RSS feeds are able to be “auto discovered” by many RSS readers on any page of the LizardTech website.

Most of you are probably already using GeoExpress 7. We’ve received some rave reviews from some of you about the new features we added, so we thought this might be a good time to introduce and explain how to use some of the great new tools in GeoExpress 7.

If you’ve ever received imagery from the USDA NAIP program, particularly MrSID Generation 2 (MG2) images from previous years, you’ll have noticed that many of the images have black collars around them. If you load these images into your GIS application and drop out these black collars, you’ll see a lot of ugly “speckling.”

These speckling artifacts happen because compressing images to MrSID at high compression ratios requires approximating colors. In other words, “black” becomes “almost black.” While the human eye doesn’t ordinarily notice the difference, this can make it difficult, not to mention ugly, to mosaic images together. Speckling happens with other background colors, too. Below you can see speckling around the edge of a mosaic with a white background.

Not to fear, though. GeoExpress 7 has new “despeckling” tools to clean these images up.

Start GeoExpress, and add your SID files to the “Despeckle” tab of the job list. In most cases, you won’t even need to adjust any options. Just click the “Despeckle Selected Images” button below the job list and GeoExpress will clean up your images for you. Here’s the result:

Next time, we’ll talk about “tiling out” images as TIFFs.

Images courtesy of MapMart.