Save it as a GIF file under the same name with the background color set to transparent (if your editor doesn’t support transparency, use IrfanView to set the background to transparent).
Modify it as much as you want without resizing it.Go to the “Cache” subdirectory of the EarthPaint program directory, and open the GIF file for the overlay in your favorite graphics editor.Here’s a screenshot of EarthPaint in action:Īnd here’s how the results look in Google Earth:īut it’s also possible to modify the overlay in another program, fixing it up or adding more elaborate graphics to it: Once you’re done, you export the overlay directly to Google Earth, where you can save it as a KML or KMZ file (there’s no direct Save capability in EarthPaint). One big annoyance is that the font always resets itself to the default size, so you’ll have to keep changing it to your desired size and type every time. Once a graphic is drawn, editing options are limited to Undo you can’t otherwise erase or modify graphic elements after they’ve been created. Line (freehand and straight adjustable line width).In either case, EarthPaint will load in a black-and-white version of the current view in Google Earth, which you can draw on top of using a standard set of vector drawing tools in different colors: EarthPaint will give you the option of either synchronizing its view with the current one in Google Earth, or setting a new location. First, fire up Google Earth, zoom in to your area of interest, then start up EarthPaint. And even for the fancier stuff, EarthPaint can simplify the task. For fancy or elaborate graphics, this is still a useful approach, but for creating a basic graphic overlay for Google Earth, EarthPaint is the way to go. It involved a multi-step process of saving the GE screen image, loaded it into a graphics program, overlaying the graphics on top, etc.
Sample hurricane data files are available at the website.Finally, EarthPlot can take position, view direction and speed data, and create an flyover path in Google Earth.EarthPlot is a great companion program to GE-Graph.ĮarthPaint 1.3: A while back, I had a couple of posts on how to add raster and vector graphic imagery to Google Earth as an image overlay. Here’s a screenshot from the website showing both post and contour mapping, plotted on top of a USGS topo overlay:Īnd a graduated raster map for a hurricane’s path and intensity:
The most recent versions of their software are now available as freeware. duke.Back in 2005, EarthPlot software released several shareware tools for plotting data and creating graphic overlays in Google Earth. This represents an image with 1-bit RGB colors.
Next, we create a new BufferedImage with the same dimensions as the original and most impotently we pass in the BufferedImage.TYPE_BYTE_BINARY. We can obtain a BufferedImage by using the ImageIO.read() method.