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I want to automate some processes in raster images. Thus, one of the modules that I use is gdal_merge module of GDAL library in order to create RGB and False color satellite images. So I execute:

gdal_merge.py -separate -n 0 -a_nodata 0 -o output.tif band_4.tif band_3.tif band_2.tif

which works fine. After that I want to render and save it with the current styling. Just like the option "save as rendered image" of QGIS. How can I succeed that with GDAL ?

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  • Possible duplicate of gis.stackexchange.com/questions/48034/…. If not, please explain what styling you intend to save: RGB, paletted, pseudo-colour?
    – AndreJ
    Commented Aug 5, 2017 at 18:46
  • Yes, It is very similar to gis.stackexchange.com/questions/48034/… . Thank you for that @AndreJ. My general purpose is to create RGB and pseudo-colour 8bit images in order to serve via GeoServer of MapServer. I also try gdal_translate first to convert the bands into 8bits and after gdal_merge to create the 3-band image but it created an image with much noise in the pixels that represented the sea.
    – Capdi
    Commented Aug 6, 2017 at 13:13
  • It would help if you can tell more about your input rasters, maybe give a link to public access data.
    – AndreJ
    Commented Aug 6, 2017 at 13:18
  • My input rasters are Sentinel2 data (jp2) format. And I want to create 3-band.tif , 8bit images with GDAL. So at first I execute: gdal_merge.py -separate -n 0 -a_nodata 0 -co "PHOTOMETRIC=rgb" -o output.tif band_4.jp2 band_3.jp2 band_2.jp2 which creates a 3-band 16bit image. After that I run: gdal_translate -ot Byte -scale 0 65535 0 255 -b 1 -b 2 -b 3 output.tif output_8bit.tif but the result is an image with 0 values.When I run the above command after saving as rendered with QGIS the result is exactly what I expected
    – Capdi
    Commented Aug 6, 2017 at 13:49

1 Answer 1

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Sentinel2 L1C values describe the TOA reflectency captured in 12 bit ranging from 0 to 1 multiplied with a fixed constant which is currently 10000.

So you don't have values from 0 to 65.535, rather from 0 to 10.000. Values for the ground even stay within the range from 0 to 4096 (maybe except some bright parts of glaciers).

QGIS applies value stretching automatically based on the histogram or std. deviation. You can see the values from the Layer properties:

enter image description here

So your picture will be way too dark if you scale down with a max value of 65535. If you want to keep the details in bright areas (e.g. clouds), you should scale from 0 to 10000. But if you want to have the ground bright enough, scale from 0 to 4096.

Additional hint: Instead of using gdal_merge, you can use gdalbuildvrt for the first step, which will be much faster.

gdalbuildvrt -separate -o output.vrt B04.jp2 B03.jp2 B02.jp2
gdal_translate -ot Byte -scale 0 4096 0 255 -b 1 -b 2 -b 3 output.vrt output_8bit.tif
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  • I ran both gdalbuildvrt and gdal_merge with the scale of 0-4096 and works fine ! Thank you so much @RoVo !!
    – Capdi
    Commented Aug 7, 2017 at 9:49

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