# Maximum pixel value by color [closed]

I have an image with three bands that are RGB and correspond to percent values from 0 - 100.

I want to create an image where the maximum pixel value amongst all three bands is one single color.

For example, for a specific pixel, if the value in Band 3 (Blue) is highest when compared to the values in Band 1 and 2, then blue is what the color of that pixel will be. And so on for all other pixels.

So far, I understand how to get a single band which simply represents the maximum value for each pixel and I can display that using a singleband gray symbology type.

But, is there a to do is so the maximum value is represented by a color?

## closed as unclear what you're asking by PolyGeo♦Aug 8 at 19:34

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• You have tags for QGIS and ArcGIS Desktop but mention neither in your question body. Which are you using? What precisely have you tried with it? – PolyGeo Aug 8 at 19:34

Try raster calculator, for example:

("RGBraster@1" > "RGBraster@2")*("RGBraster@1" > "RGBraster@3")*1
+
("RGBraster@2" > "RGBraster@1")*("RGBraster@2" > "RGBraster@3")*2
+
("RGBraster@3" > "RGBraster@1")*("RGBraster@3" > "RGBraster@2")*3


Should evaluate to 1 for red, 2 for blue and 3 for green. (When a condition is true it will return 1, else 0)

Then symbolize:

If you want multiband output create three separate outputs, one for each band and then combine them using Build Virtual Raster.

I would also like to see an answer to this questions using either QGIS or ArcGIS GUI's. Meanwhile I am posting a Python approach to this problem because both QGIS and ArcGIS provide a way to read a raster into a NumPy array.

If you are using QGIS, you already have GDAL installed. With the following code you can read the raster as an array:

import gdal

ds = gdal.Open(r'C:\path\to\file.tiff', 0)


In ArcGIS you can use the RasterToNumPyArray function as follows:

import arcpy

arr = arcpy.RasterToNumpyArray(r'C:\path\to\file.tiff')


The resulting array will have 3 dimensions: bands * rows * cols. Once you have this array, you can use NumPy to get the maximum value along the first axis (band dimension):

import numpy as np

idx = np.argmax(arr, axis=0)  # 2D array -> rows * cols


You have now the band for each cell where the value is the highest (0 for red, 1 for green and 2 for blue). The next step is coverting the maximum values in each pixel to 255 and the other pixel values to 0 (so that pixel value will display the color of the maximum value). However, to accomplish this you first need to create a meshgrid so you can index your original array. Check the documentation if you are unsure what a meshgrid is.

x = np.arange(arr.shape[2])  # 1D array from 0 to cols
y = np.arange(arr.shape[1])  # 1D array from 0 to rows
xx, yy = np.meshgrid(x, y)   # 2 2D arrays with the indices for each cell


Now you can index the actual pixels with the maximum values and convert them to 255. Then, everything that is not 255 can be converted to 0.

arr[idx, yy, xx] = 255
arr[arr != 255] = 0


If you used GDAL, then you can save your 3D array to a new GeoTIFF using the approach presented in this answer. On the other side, if you used arcpy, you can use the NumPyArrayToRaster function. However, bear in mind that you will need to pass the raster's origin and the pixel resolution from your original raster to this function in order to get a correct georeferenced raster.

Note: in case of a tie (e.g. a pixel has the same maximum for two or three of the colors) this approach will yield the color mix between those colors. For example, in the case one pixel has R: 116, G: 166 and B: 87, both R and G values will be converted to 255 and B will be 0, yielding a yellow pixel.