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Method and Materials of Project

The maps used in this project were compiled from the UNC-CH Geological Sciences Library and from the personal collection of Dr. Allen F. Glazner.

Scanning work, visual enhancement/correction, georeferencing, and website creation was done by Nolan Caudill, undergraduate at UNC-CH.

The maps were scanned using the department’s HP designjet 815mfp large format printer/scanner. They were scanned at 200 dpi into TIFF format for greatest image quality.

From here they were transferred to PC via CD to do the visual touch-up work. The majority of the project was done using Adobe Photoshop 5.5 running on a IBM PC, with some work being done with Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1 on a Dell Precision 360 with a 2.80 Ghz Intel Pentium 4 CPU with 2.0 GB of RAM.

In Photoshop, the Levels command was used to adjust the brightness and color balance. Since many of the maps had started to yellow due to age, the background was normalized using the Levels command. After this, I adjusted the color balance to enhance the color of the map as the whiting of the background usually washed them out a small amount. I then used the Sharpen filter (Unsharp Mask) to clarify the picture and reduce the blur on the fine details of the maps. The finished file was then saved in JPEG format for quicker downloading. The map portion of the document was then cropped out to use for the georeferencing.

The georeferencing was done in ESRI ArcMap 8.3. A grid obtained of the 1:62500 quadrangles was projected in standard UTM (Zone 11) and the cropped images of the maps were then georeferenced by matching the corners of the cropped images with the corners on the grid. The park and area maps were done differently as they were not in an easy to use shape for georeferencing. Using the latitude and longitude lines on the maps, an online longitude/latitude to UTM converter was used (located here) and manually entered in ArcMap as X and Y coordinates. Anywhere from 5-12 georeference points were used on the park and area maps to insure greatest precision in alignment.

Website created by Nolan Caudill
(mailto: ncaudill@email.unc.edu)

January 2005