Newsletters
LizardTales Newsletter – April 2008
From the General Manager
Dear Friends of LizardTech,
April marks the beginning of spring and for LizardTech it means entering the fourth and final quarter in our fiscal year. The third quarter was a busy one for us, as we launched our flagship product GeoExpress 7. There’s always so much planning, preparing, and executing going on around a product launch and this time it was no different. This year we not only launched a new version of GeoExpress, we also rolled out Express Suite, which consists of GeoExpress, Express Server and Spatial Express working together as a complete package. The biggest new feature in GeoExpress 7 – the ability to upload imagery directly to Express Server – enables all three of LizardTech’s applications to interoperate with one another, which makes it easier and faster than ever to distribute your imagery. Visit the Express Suite product page to learn more.
I also want to point out an Express Server portal site we launched to demonstrate just how easy it is to upload imagery to Express Server from GeoExpress. You can try it out with your own imagery. Visit the Express Server Portal Homepage to create your free Express Server upload account and see it in action for yourself.
At the same time, we started a Blog called Zoom and an online Forums site. Zoom includes conversation about the latest geospatial industry happenings, insight into LizardTech development, and news about LizardTech products. The forums are meant for open discussion on all things related to LizardTech and its product lines. I encourage you to participate by submitting any software tips or questions that you may have or your thoughts and ideas about the geospatial industry.
Here’s to a sunny and prosperous spring for everyone!
Best Regards,
Jim
Geospatial
Exploring the new features in GeoExpress
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 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.
Not to fear, though, as GeoExpress 7 has new “despeckling” tools to clean these images up. Start GeoExpress, and add your SID files to the “Despeckle” tab. In most cases, you won’t even need to adjust any options. Just choose “Despeckle Selected Images” and GeoExpress will clean up your images for you.
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 do to in GeoExpress 7:
Add the file(s) you want to work with to the “Images” tab. Select “Tools | Image Crop…” In the “Output Tiling” section, choose how many rows and columns you want to divide your image into, and click “OK.” Now, just choose “GeoTIFF” as your output format and select “Encode Selected Images.” In no time, you’ll have a series of GeoTIFF tiles created from your original SID image.
These are just a few of the features customers have told us have been most valuable to them; we’re sure you have your favorite new features as well. Feel free to let us know how you’re using GeoExpress 7 by emailing us at info@lizardtech.com, or by participating in our recently launched 2008 geospatial products survey. All survey participants are automatically entered to win a $50 gift card for Amazon.com.
Where is LizardTech?
Upcoming Events:
ESRI Southeast Regional Users Conference
April 14 – 16, 2008 - Hyatt Regency, Riverfront, Jacksonville, FL. Booth #117.
http://www.esri.com/events/serug/index.html
MidAmerica GIS Symposium
April 20 – 24, 2008 - Westin Crown Center, Kansas City, MO. Booth #4.
http://magicweb.kgs.ku.edu/magic/symposiums/2008/index.cfm
California GIS Conference
April 23 – 25, 2008 - DoubleTree Hotel, Modesto, CA.
http://www.calgis.org/
ASPRS 2008 Annual Conference
April 28 – May 2, 2008 - Oregon Convention Center, Portland, Oregon. Booth #318.
http://www.asprs.org/portland08/
Washington GIS Conference
May 5 – 7, 2008 - Seattle Center, Northwest Rooms, Seattle, WA.
http://www.waurisa.org/conferences/2008_Conference_Index.html
4th Annual GEOINT Tech Days
May 14 – 16, 2008 - Sheraton Premier at Tysons Corner, Vienna, VA.
http://www.usgif.org/Events_TechDays.aspx
Nevada GIS Conference
May 19 – 21, 2008 - Orleans Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas, NV.
http://www.ngis.org/portal/
GEOTEC Event 2008
June 2 – 5, 2008 - Ottawa Congress Centre, Ottawa, Ontario.
http://www.geoplace.com/ME2/dirsect.asp?sid=F1E958ECB4E84C1C97324D4851580DDB&nm=GeoTec+Event
View a regularly updated list of the events we attend here: LizardTech Events.
Fun Discoveries
See Express Server 6 at work! Check out the 5 terabytes of aerial orthophotos released by North Carolina One Map. This imagery from 27 counties is being delivered via Express Server 6 for viewing in your geospatial applications.
There’s a really cool historical aerials site hosted by NETR online (A Division of National Environmental Title Research, LLC). With the help of GeoExpress and Express Server NETR was able to publish aerials showing off different locations in the U.S. Some of the locations have data from several different years going back as far as the 1950s, so you can see the difference at any given location over time.
Case Studies and Customer Wins
Recently California-based GIS Planning, Inc, which creates user-friendly GIS applications on the Web, purchased GeoExpress and Express Server 6 in order to compress, host and serve large amounts of aerial imagery for dozens of hosted client Web applications.
GIS Planning was looking for a solution to quickly configure and deploy large image data sets for customers and easily update existing image catalogs with new imagery. In addition, the company needed to improve performance when displaying high resolution imagery at different extents and improve the refresh time of ArcIMS map services that use raster imagery. LizardTech Express Server met those requirements and has proven to be a very effective solution for GIS Planning. Deployment and management of image data is much more efficient now, and the performance in their Web applications using imagery has improved, the company stated.
Here is a partial list of recently added clients to our ever expanding customer base:
North America
Telesto Solutions, Inc.
City of Aspen
Gulf Coast Permit Systems
Eagan, McAllister Associates, Inc
O’Brien and Gere Engineers, Inc.
The Energy Cooperative
City of Philadelphia Water Department
Pictometry
Aerial Experts
PBS&J
Alabama Department of Transportation
EHA Planners
Cubic Corporation
ShotSpotter
Northwestern Energy
Ministry of Lands and Agriculture
Canada Department of National Defense
Kinder Morgan
Ministry of Transportation
Federal
U.S. Department of State
Northrop Grumman
Boeing Autometric
U.S. Central Command
Lockheed Martin
NGA
US Army Corps of Engineers
SAIC
Latin America
Centro Nacional para la Prevencion de Desastres
IMT de Mexico, S.A. de C.V.
EMEA
Cambridge Arctic Shelf Programme
Regione Toscana
Tragsatec
Centro De Calculo De Alava
London Borough of Richmond
Katowice City Office
Institut Cartografic de Catalunya
Grontmij Nederland bv
Reseller News
LizardTech has recently signed a reseller agreement with proSPATIAL, LLC, a Denver-based geospatial technology firm, to serve as a distributor of the LizardTech Express Suite consisting of GeoExpress, Express Server and Spatial Express. We are very excited to welcome proSPATIAL to our ever expanding network of resellers!
Tips and Tricks
This is a returning segment of our quarterly newsletter. Each quarter we’ll offer a practical tidbit about how to perform a certain task or achieve a certain result using one of our software products – a tip or trick you might not be aware of that we hope you’ll find useful.
Tip:
Do you need to downsample your MrSID Generation 3 images? Use the optimizer – it’s a quick process!
Let’s say you have images with a resolution of .5 meters per pixel and you wish to resample it to 2 meters per pixel:
- Images > Add MrSID image to optimize (or press the optimize button)
- Add your image
- Click the “More Optimize Options” button on the properties tab
- Select the “Optimize Settings” tab
- Select the “Resample image” checkbox and choose the level (in this case 4, to go from .5 to 2)
Hot Tips?
Do you have tips that you want to share? Send them to suggestions@lizardtech.com and we might publish your tip in the next issue of LizardTales.
Employment Opportunities
LizardTech is always seeking great talent. To learn more about current opportunities to join a dedicated, talented and close-knit team, please visit our Careers Page.
