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I am trying to perform the following task, but it does not seem to work:

I have got a raster file (raster.tif) containing an aerial photo, which I want to clip using a shapefile (clip.shp) that contains a polygon. The result I want is raster file (clipped.tif) containing the aerial photo inside the clip polygon and the rest being transparent, so I can overlay my clipped raster on an OSM map.

Basically I did this:

gdalwarp -cutline clip.shp raster.tif clipped.tif

The resulting clipped.tif shows the correct clipped aerial photo, but surrounded by a black background covering the extent of the original raster.tif file.

I have played around with the dstnodata and the dstalpha options, but with no luck. I am not exactly professor in raster processing, so the alpha channel stuff is new to me.

Any good ideas of how to perform such an operation?

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2 Answers 2

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Try the combination of options from the link below. It worked for me and shows the correct transparency in QGIS. You can grab the gralwarp command-line from there or try using the UI.

Clip a Raster in an Irregular Shape using QGIS

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  • Hi Thanks for the tip. The QGIS raster clipping functionality is fine, that it is possible to see the command-line command beeing composed as you configure the clipping in the GUI. The only problem was that I was not able to actually do the clipping in QGIS as I keep getting the error "Cannot compute bounding box of cutline." Both raster and clipping file are in the same native SRS. When I copy the command-line gdalwarp -q -cutline clip.shp -crop_to_cutline -dstalpha -of GTiff raster.tif out.tif, gdalwarp acts if there is a syntaks error.
    – Ulrik Balslev
    Commented Nov 10, 2012 at 9:15
  • I have the same problem. Did you ever find a solution?
    – someguyinafloppyhat
    Commented Nov 5, 2020 at 21:59
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OK, I found the solution (work around). I realized, that I was working with an old version of gdalwarp, where the -cut_to_cropline option was not supported! Anyway I got an upgrade done and it seem to accept this option. I still got the "Cannot compute bounding box of cutline" error, that obviously has something to do with my cutline shape file. I removed the .prj file and ... tata ... it worked.

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  • Ulrik Balslev, where the .prj file exist?
    – newGIS
    Commented Jul 16, 2017 at 6:46

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