The two do different things, deliberately. The toolbar's folder means “bring this into the image I am looking at”: one raster becomes a layer over the current image, and several ask whether to layer them or combine them into one all-band image. File ▸ Open makes a new window instead. Files can also be dragged onto the window.

Nothing is corrected on load. The default stretch is Original - the band's full range - and no calibration, mask or resampling is applied. The catalogue reports what conversions the delivery offers; applying one stays an explicit act.

Turns a multi-band stack into one layer per chosen band, which is what to use when bands need separate display settings or separate processing. The inverse - several single-band files into one image - is the Combine prompt that appears when opening several rasters at once.

Every raster, vector overlay, polygon and annotation layer in one drag-reorderable stack, each with a visibility toggle and an opacity slider. The base raster is a member of that stack, not a floor under it, so a layer can sit below it. Clicking a layer's name makes it the active layer - the target for processing, for the Bands panel and for the readout - marked with an amber scope glyph. Right-click for Rename, Remove, Save As GeoTIFF, Copy, Open in New Window, Use as Processing Region and Relief Shading.

Categories covering georeferencing (CRS, pixel and ground size in the CRS's own units), sensor identity and the resolved calibration profile, acquisition date and sun geometry, the composite's source file and band for each slot, applied display geometry such as crop and rotation, raw metadata, and a System category showing the GPU, memory gauges and streaming state.

The footer is the instrument panel: cursor coordinate, pixel values, display scale as a percentage where 100 % is 1:1, the scale bar, and an SDR/HDR badge with the display's EDR headroom. Right-clicking the map copies the clicked coordinate as signed decimal degrees. Rulers draw along the top and left edges and switch off while the image is rotated, because a ruler labels one axis along a screen edge and that is only true while the two are parallel.

Drag a rectangle over the active layer to keep; Shift squares it. The marquee snaps outward to whole pixels of the layer being cut, so a marquee dragged around something keeps everything it enclosed. Cropping again intersects with the existing window rather than replacing it. It is display geometry - no sample is discarded, ⌘Z undoes it - and it carries through to a GeoTIFF export as a source window, so the written pixels are the file's own.

Drag the dial to turn the active layer to any angle, 0 to 359 degrees clockwise. No pixel is resampled. Rotating the base raster turns document-pixel space itself, so polygons, imported vectors and annotations follow the imagery they were placed on, and Info states the offset from the source in the file's own pixels.

The base document is A and any added or derived raster is B. Four modes: fixed side by side, a draggable swipe, a linear A/B blend, and timed flicker. All are display-only and isolate A and B from the rest of the stack. Pressing the glyph again stops comparing.

Clicking the image drops a callout: a dot pinned to that pixel and a text box standing off from it, joined by a leader line. The dot is held in image pixels so it stays on its feature through pan and zoom, while the box keeps one readable size at every zoom - so the distance between them is not a ground measurement. Selecting a callout shows a style bar with five colours: box outline, box fill, line and dot, text, and a highlight behind it.

One row per band. Each row's three dots put that band in the red, green or blue channel, and clicking what the row says the band is lets you correct or supply it. Above the list, presets - True colour, Colour infrared, SWIR, Agriculture, Geology - each drawn as a small spectrum showing where its three bands sit; a preset whose bands the image lacks draws them hollow rather than being greyed out with no reason. Where bands state their wavelengths there is a spectrum strip whose R, G and B markers drag along it, or step band by band with the arrow keys.

Original (full range), percentile clip, manual low/high, and empirical-CDF histogram equalisation, each with gamma. The default when an image opens is Original.

Bins the shown bands over one shared domain so the channels can be compared. Scope switches between the viewport and the whole image. For integer data a bin is a whole number of values wide, so a gap means no pixel holds that value rather than no value could land there, and the bars are drawn as steps because a histogram is a count over a range, not a sample at a point.

Offered when the layer is recognised as an elevation model. An illumination dial - the handle is the sun's position on the sky dome seen from above, centre overhead, rim at the horizon - with vertical exaggeration, multi-directional light, cast shadows, skylight, and a hypsometric, slope or aspect tint over any colormap. A live thumbnail follows every control; the full-resolution pass runs only on Apply.

Compiles the same expression language as Band Math to a Metal shader at runtime and draws the raster you are on as it, false-coloured through a colormap with a legend. Display only, no file. Use it when what you want is a look rather than a layer.

Click to add vertices and click near the start, or double-click, to close. Each polygon becomes its own layer, carries its ground area, and can be renamed, edited vertex by vertex, or saved as GeoJSON. Marking one Use as Processing Region limits jobs to it; region polygons draw in graticule cyan.

Keeps the image inside or outside a polygon and makes the rest nodata. The inside case crops to the polygon's bounding box rather than leaving a shape in a black expanse.

Materialises the provider's own calibration equations - the ones the delivery publishes - turning digital numbers into radiance, reflectance or brightness temperature. Scale and offset in both conventions, solar-elevation reflectance, Planck brightness temperature, Sentinel quantification, Maxar gain and bandwidth, DIMAP divisor gain, and lookup tables. Per-band quantity, units, equation and coefficient provenance are written into the result and shown in Info.

Estimates the atmospheric path radiance from the darkest pixels in each band and subtracts it. The scene percentile, the bounded estimation sample and whether negatives are clamped are all yours to set. The output identifies the estimated dark value and states explicitly that no mask was applied.

Writes the tone curves you are looking through into a new raster. Every display channel is put through its own curve - stretch, levels, curve, histogram equalisation, decibel, whatever is in force - and the result is written as a georeferenced GeoTIFF at full bit depth, either in the source's own data type over that type's whole range or as Float32 from 0 to 1. The curve is evaluated per sample rather than read from the 4096-entry table the shader samples, so the file is finer than the screen was.

Removes the brightness difference between slopes facing the sun and slopes facing away, so reflectance can be compared across terrain. SCS+C, C-correction, Minnaert with the constant fitted per band, and the statistical-empirical rotation. Sun zenith and azimuth are auto-filled from acquisition metadata where the product states them, and are editable otherwise. Slope and aspect come from a Horn 3 × 3 operator.

Resamples the raster onto a different coordinate reference system, writing a new file on the target grid. Every pixel is interpolated, so the output is a new set of measurements rather than the same ones relabelled. The result opens as a new document.

Warps this raster onto another loaded raster's exact grid - same CRS, same extent, same pixel size - so the two can be compared or differenced cell for cell. Nearest, bilinear, cubic, cubic-spline, Lanczos, average or mode, chosen explicitly.

Takes a spectral selection, a rectangular window, or both, and writes them out without interpolating anything. Bands keep their source order and their values are the file's own.

Fits a transform from points whose position you know in both images - affine, second- or third-order polynomial, or thin-plate spline - and warps the raster through it. Two images, one map: the subject is the active layer and the reference is whatever is already correctly placed beneath it, so each point is one feature clicked twice.

Aligns this raster to a reference by measuring the shift between them with GPU phase correlation, then warping once onto the reference's grid. Reports RMSE and peak ratio before and after.

Removes the terrain displacement in an image taken at an angle, using the sensor model the delivery carries - RPC or ground control points - together with a DEM. Target CRS, pixel size, interpolation and maximum transformer error are all explicit.

Injects the detail of a higher-resolution guide band into coarser bands, so a multispectral scene takes the sharpness of its panchromatic one while keeping its colour relationships. Methods are SFIM, Brovey, GSA and MTF-GLP-HPM. A standard step before segmentation, object-based classification and any work where the boundary matters more than the pixel.

Removes the periodic banding a pushbroom sensor's detector array leaves, by notching that frequency out of the Fourier transform or by subtracting a row or column profile. Stripe direction, centre frequency and bandwidth are all stated rather than inferred.

Smooths the image by suppressing high spatial frequencies, either through a GPU FFT or by an Accelerate Gaussian convolution.

Keeps the fine detail and removes the broad brightness variation, either as the bare residual or added back as sharpening with an amount you enter.

Enhances local contrast, by unsharp masking, by guided filtering - which preserves edges rather than haloing them - or by Richardson–Lucy deconvolution against a Gaussian point spread function.

Joins several rasters into one, choosing the output grid, where the seam runs between overlapping scenes, and how they are blended across it. Two seam solvers: least-cost path routed through pinned waypoints, and graph cut, which can isolate an island. Four join modes: hard, feathered with a linear or cosine ramp, distance-weighted, and seamless multi-band Laplacian. A live preview composites on a decimated grid and the seam can be edited by hand.

Brings one raster onto another's radiometric scale - by histogram specification, linear optimal transport matching mean and full covariance, global regression, LIRRN, or IR-MAD - so two dates or two sensors can be compared.

Combines this raster's bands into one new layer - a named index resolved from its spectral roles, or an expression you write. Presets cover NDVI, NDWI, NDMI, NBR, NDSI, NDRE and tasseled-cap brightness, greenness and wetness, resolved against whatever bands the image actually carries. A custom expression takes an arbitrary formula in b1…bN with arithmetic, comparison, logical and bitwise operators, conditionals, clamp, min and max, logarithms and QA bit extraction. Evaluated over the raw samples, so the result is a measurement rather than a picture of one.

Mean, standard deviation, minimum, maximum and optional percentiles per band, over the whole image or a chosen region.

The same statistics, per polygon, in a single pass over the raster however many zones there are. A pixel belongs to a zone when its centre falls inside.

Principal components, or the minimum noise fraction, which is PCA after whitening against an estimate of the noise. Both write one band per component.

Compares two dates and reports both the classes and the continuous surface behind them: differencing, log-ratio for radar, index difference including dNBR burn severity, or IR-MAD's no-change probability as the threshold.

Differences two epochs of terrain and reports the volume of soil lost and gained, with the uncertainty that makes the figure defensible: a level of detection measured from ground you mark as stable, a probability of real change per cell, and a spatial-coherence pass that keeps a coherent patch of marginal cells and drops isolated spikes.

Turns a geocoded unwrapped interferogram into displacement, in metres, with the coherence that says which of it is a measurement. Millimetre precision at 30–80 m posting, so it resolves slow motion - creep, subsidence, a slope moving before it fails.

Writes the steepness of an elevation model as a raster, in degrees, percent or rise over run, optionally with the downslope bearing beside it. Horn's 3 × 3 kernel - the same one the relief shading and the topographic correction use, so a slope class and a hillshade cannot disagree about the same cell. Flat ground gets no aspect rather than a bearing of north.

Turns one band of continuous measurements into named classes by a table of breaks, writing a class raster with an attribute table. The band's own distribution is drawn behind the breaks, because where they fall is the whole of what the output says and a threshold typed with nothing behind it is chosen blind.

The New Zealand Land Use Capability system. Intersects up to five factor layers - rock type, soil, slope, erosion, vegetation - into inventory units, sieves them to a minimum mappable area, and looks each combination up in an editable rule table. The output is a unit map with a full attribute table: every unit's factor codes, its area, its LUC class 1 to 8 with its e/w/s/c subclass, and where each of its five statements came from.

Finds groupings in the data without any training: K-Means with k-means++/maximin seeding, ISODATA with adaptive split and merge, or a Gaussian/Mahalanobis mixture. All deterministic and multicore, with an optional Metal backend for the assignment step. Images too large for memory are fitted on a decimated sample and assigned block by block. The output is a class raster with editable per-class colours and per-class ground areas in the Classes inspector.

Assigns a class to every pixel from training polygons you have labelled, using random forest, maximum likelihood, minimum distance or spectral angle.

Reads a towed electromagnetic-induction logger file and produces three georeferenced products in one window: a point raster of what was measured, an interpolated surface per channel, and optionally an inverted conductivity-against-depth stack. The panel is a stack of stages rather than a wizard - every filter is a row that switches off, the pipeline re-runs on any change, and excluded records stay visible in grey so you can see where a filter bites. Stages run in order: parse and project, acquisition geometry, motion filter, range filter, ferrous interference, along-track despike, rolling mean, GNSS latency, sensor offset, instrument drift, temperature standardisation, and calibration against reference profiles.

Takes a logger export and produces a ranked soil-pit plan: it grids the survey, inverts it, groups the ground into management zones and sites the pits, as one act. The three purposes are kept apart and a site never carries two - calibration wants ordinary ground, training wants unbiased coverage, and a diagnostic pit wants the anomalies.

Groups the inverted survey into substrate units and draws them as polygons. It clusters the whole column - log conductivity per layer, plus where the profile steps and by how much - rather than a depth slice, because two places can have identical shallow readings and completely different profiles, and it is the profile that decides rooting depth and drainage.

Samples the posterior distribution of the layered model under one sounding, so the width of each layer's interval says how well these coils actually constrain it. Click a cell on the map to choose the sounding and set how many layers to ask the readings to support. Past a factor of ten, the data do not resolve that layer at all, however confident a single-model inversion looks.

Turns substrate units into a Land Resource Inventory factor layer. Each unit is listed with the evidence it was built from - the depth of its strongest conductivity step, its layer conductivities, its area and how confidently it was assigned - and you give each one a class from the handbook's own coding.

Searches by area, date window and cloud cover, then downloads the chosen bands as a tracked job. Four sources: Earth Search on AWS, Microsoft Planetary Computer, CNES GEODES and LINZ. Landsat is free on Planetary Computer and requester-pays on Earth Search; GEODES needs a free API key for downloads but not for searching. MODIS is on Planetary Computer only, grouped under Reflectance, Vegetation, Temperature and fire, and Snow and ice - it arrives on the sinusoidal grid, so Reproject is usually needed before combining it with a UTM or NZTM scene.

LINZ publishes a static catalogue rather than a search service, so this source is selected by map sheet instead of by a dragged box. The world map becomes the Topo50 1:50,000 sheet grid; click the sheets you want, then Find Surveys asks the bucket which aerial surveys hold tiles for them. The results are surveys, newest first - over one sheet that list is a time series of the same ground across decades. Hovering names the sheet the way LINZ printed it, and the tile by its filename. The map and the list are one selection.

A stalled or dropped transfer is retried a few times on its own and resumed where the archive allows it. If it still fails, the row states what went wrong in one sentence and offers Retry where trying again can help - a timeout or a lost connection, but not a refusal such as HTTP 403, which would answer the same way twice.

Writes a GeoTIFF of source measurements through GDAL, carrying any crop through as a source window and persisting attribute-table edits. The rendered picture exports separately as PNG, HEIC or OpenEXR through Image I/O.

A processing job writes its result into a temporary file and opens it as a layer, which is what makes the Processing menu feel immediate - and what means closing the window would throw the result away. Closing a window holding such layers lists them first, with a tick and a format for each, and Save, Don't Save or Cancel. The formats are all scientific containers - GeoTIFF, Cloud-Optimised GeoTIFF, KEA and ERDAS Imagine.

Add to Photos renders what is on screen and files it in a Hachure album, created the first time. It is the same picture the rendered export writes - display bands through their tone curves - so the file says the curve is baked into its pixels, and the scene's centre goes in as GPS. Only PNG and HEIC are offered: a photo library has nowhere to put a float HDR image, and a GeoTIFF of measurements does not belong in one.

macOS gives an app exactly the files chosen in an open panel and nothing beside them. Several formats are not one file: a shapefile keeps its projection in a sibling .prj and its attributes in a .dbf, and a satellite delivery is a manifest beside its band files. When a companion cannot be read, Hachure asks for the enclosing folder - there is no way to widen the permission without you choosing the wider thing.

A 10–80 % ceiling on unified memory, 50 % by default, that every whole-image job checks before reading a pixel - so an over-large job fails in a second rather than paging for twenty minutes. When a job exceeds it, the window reports both the required and available figures and offers Run Anyway, with Cancel as the default. The ceiling is a question, not a verdict.

Twenty sensors with per-band name, common name, centre wavelength, FWHM, native ground sample distance, spectral role, polarisation and thermal constants, plus versioned calibration profiles keyed on processing level, collection, baseline and acquisition date. It is user-editable: sensors can be added or overridden, and edits are validated before they are saved.

An added raster must share the base's CRS. Reproject one onto the other's CRS, then add it again. If they share a CRS but sit slightly apart, that is a registration problem, not a projection one - try Co-registration first.

Regression and IR-MAD normalisation, every change-detection method, and DEM of Difference all compare co-located pixels, so the two rasters must have the same size, CRS and pixel size. Resample to Match Layer puts one on the other's exact grid - nearest for anything thematic.

Raw 12- and 16-bit radiometric data is near-flat without a stretch, and Hachure applies none on open. Percentile clip with a modest gamma is the usual first move. This changes nothing stored - it is exposure, not correction.

Check the spectral roles. A named index resolves against the bands the stack says are NIR and Red; if those are wrong the arithmetic still succeeds and produces a convincing surface of the wrong two bands. Correct the role on the band's row, then re-run.

The .prj and .dbf are separate files and the sandbox grants only what you selected. Name a Workspace folder that contains them, or answer the folder prompt when it appears.

Hachure reads what its curated GDAL driver set reads. A HEIC that arrived through File ▸ Import from Photos is converted losslessly to TIFF on the way in and opens fine; the same file selected from the Finder does not, because that path hands it straight to GDAL and the HEIF driver is not built in.