Eduard
1.3
Eduard creates beautiful and accurate Swiss-style shaded relief images for maps.
Eduard is a relief shading app for cartographers who create terrain maps.
Download Eduard on the Mac App Store or download a free demo. Eduard Demo does not include import and download functionality.
Eduard 1.3 requires a Mac with macOS 13 Ventura or later. Eduard 1.1 requires macOS 12.3 Monterey or later. Eduard supports Macs with Intel and Apple M1 and M2 chips.
New in Version 1.3 (3 July 2023): Render ambient occlusion to add depth and texture to shaded relief.
New in Version 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**.
Watch Eduard being introduced at the NACIS 2022 conference.
The presentation includes demos of Eduard's main features.
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 Carographics
“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.