gdalwarp: differentiate between empty-in-source and outside-of-cutline?

Question

I'm using gdalwarp to clip a polygon out of a map layer using --crop_to_cutline.

The original map layer has a lot of empty pixels (well, transparent / alpha=0, to be precise). As it stands, my output is a GeoTIFF, where the pixels that were originally transparent remain as such, and the areas of the image that would fall outside of the cutline are also transparent.

What I want is to be able to differentiate, within that output image, between the pixels that were transparent in the source and the pixels that fell outside of the cutline, say by giving them a specific value that wouldn't exist anywhere else in the image.

Is there an easy way to do that?

Answer 1

Sounds like you could use -srcnodata None and -dstnodata [other reserved value].

The original nodata pixels would maintain their value and be treated as "regular" pixels. The resulting nodata pixels (the dstnodata value now identified by the metadata) would be the ones outside of the clipping shape.

If you need to further clamp the input image beforehand to reserve the extra value, you could use gdal_translate -scale [src_min src_max dst_min dst_max], e.g. to shift the valid data range from 1-255 to 2-255.