Eduard
Eduard creates beautiful and accurate Swiss-style shaded relief images for maps.
Eduard is a relief shading app for cartographers who create terrain maps.
Eduard Cloud
Eduard Cloud will be available soon. Try it out!
Awards
Prix Carto 2023 of the Swiss Society of Cartography.
3rd place for Digital Products at the International Cartographic Conference 2023.
Download
Download Eduard on the Mac App Store or download a free demo. Eduard Demo does not include import and download functionality.
Eduard requires a Mac with macOS 13 or later; macOS 14 or 15 is recommended. Eduard supports Macs with Intel and Apple M CPUs.
Updates
Eduard 1.4.13: 8 April 2025
Download of Global Ensemble Digital Terrain Model GEDTM30.
Eduard 1.4.12: 22 January 2025
Various bug fixes and improvements, including a test to make sure elevation model downloads are not too large.
Eduard 1.4.11: 23 November 2024
Eduard now remembers the download area.
Eduard 1.4.10: 7 November 2024
Fixes a bug related to the mask dialog not appearing on macOS 13.
Eduard 1.4.8 & 1.4.9: 20 September 2024
Download of Copernicus surface and GEBCO bathymetry models, and bug fixes.
Eduard 1.4.7: 5 September 2024
Layer mask can now import image files, aerial perspective layers can now remove details , and various bug fixes and improvements.
Eduard 1.4.6: 8 March 2024
Improves the handling of bookmarks, and fixes various bugs.
Eduard 1.4.2 & 1.4.3: 16 & 17 January 2024
Updates 1.4.2 and 1.4.3 fix various bugs.
Eduard 1.4.1: 27 November 2023
Fixes a bug that prevented the settings dialog from opening.
Eduard 1.4: 23 November 2023
Layers, masks and curves: Combine multiple shadings with layers, adjust opacity and blend modes, mask layers by terrain elevation or slope, adjust contrast and brightness with curves, apply aerial perspective, and blur or sharpen layers.
Eduard 1.3.1: 6 November 2023
Compatibility with macOS 14 Sonoma.
Eduard 1.3: 3 July 2023
Render ambient occlusion to add depth and texture to shaded relief.
Eduard 1.2: 12 June 2023
Eduard 1.2 now can download MERIT DEM data, supports map scale for displaying shadings, and can combine multiple grids.
Swiss-style Shading with Machine Learning
Machine learning in Eduard enables cartographers to create Swiss-style shaded relief within seconds from digital elevation models.
Light Rotation
You define the overall direction of illumination and Eduard locally adjusts the direction of illumination to show small details and emphasize large landforms.
Left: top-left illumination. Right: bottom illumination.
Map Rotation
Eduard rotates the shading and the direction of illumination to fit your map.
Aerial Perspective
Eduard makes mountain peaks stand out or gives all landforms the same prominence.
Aerial perspective increases from left to right.
Generalization
Eduard helps you to remove distracting terrain details and adjust the granularity of the shading to the scale of your map.
Generalization increases from left to right.
Elevation Data
With Eduard you can quickly download elevation data from almost anywhere on Earth* or import all common elevation file formats**.
Layers, Masks and Curves
Combine shading layers, adjust opacity and blending modes, mask layers by terrain elevation or slope, adjust contrast and brightness with curves, apply aerial perspective, and blur or sharpen layers.
Introducing Eduard
Watch Eduard being introduced at the NACIS 2022 conference.
The presentation includes demos of Eduard's main features.
A Tour Through Eduard
by Jess Jess Zimmerman, TheMapGuy.net
What others say about Eduard
“Bravo! The relief output looks fantastic and I think this is a game changer for anyone wanting to replicate the Swiss style.”
Martin Gamache, Chief Cartographer, National Geographic Society
“Back in the old days, drawing a manual relief would take me weeks to complete. With Eduard, you can create a manual-style relief in minutes.”
Tom Patterson, US National Park Service (ret.) and author of shadedrelief.com
“Amazing cartographic software!”
Alex Tait, The Geographer, National Geographic Society
“Eduard ❤️ must have this!”
“I just decided that I'll be using a Mac so I can make gorgeous shaded relief and save a million hours by using Eduard.”
“Super intuitive interface, exports play well with Esri, and the results are quick and beautiful. I'm still swooning 😍”
Alethea Steingisser, InfoGraphics Lab, University of Oregon
“I am a bit humbled by what Eduard produced in short order.”
Nick Martinelli, Apple Maps
“This software is amazing.”
Matthew Hampton, Lead Cartographer, Metro Portland, OR.
“For the first 15 years of my career I strived, and failed, to create relief maps approaching the quality of Eduard Imhof's. Now with the release of Eduard [...], I think we're there.”
Jo Wood, City University, London
“Eduard Relief Shading for beautiful, first rate, serious gradient maps.”
Edward Tufte
“Aside from the exquisite shading that Eduard produces (!), the stability & memory management are nothing short of magical. Here's an 11.7GB .asc DEM that I cobbled together with outliers, holes, etc. Eduard ..just..works.. using ~3GB of memory.”
Jamie Robertson, Cartographer, Cairn Cartographics
“Can confirm that Eduard is awesome AND super fun. So is Crater Lake.”
Chaney Swiney, Cartographer, Benchmark Maps
“This software is absolutely amazing.”
Mike Boruta, Cartographer
Privacy Policy
We take your privacy seriously. We do not collect any of your personal data. Our customer records are not for sale or trade, and we will not disclose our customer data to any third party except as may be required by law.
Any information that you provide to us via email or other forms of communication is held in strict confidence. This includes your contact information (including your email address), as well as any data that you supply to us.
Third-party Services: You can use Eduard to download elevation data from OpenTopography and AWS Amazon (Mapzen). You can consult the OpenTopography privacy policy and the Amazon AWS privacy policy.
General Terms of Use
The Apple App Store terms and conditions apply when Eduard is purchased via the Apple App Store. The authors of Eduard do not retain any right to content, such as images or maps, that is created with Eduard.
Acknowledgements
The authors of Eduard thank the National Gegoraphic Society for its contribution through an Explorer Grant and other support.