by gnwiii » Tue Mar 14, 2017 1:52 pm America/New_York
My personal approach to the issues you posed:
1. attaching a colorbar
a. GPT is generally used in batch processing to create lots of images, hopefully all with the same colour scale. Rather than attaching a colour scale to each image, it
often makes sense to keep it separate. I often do one image using the GUI, which does let me save a colour scale, and the next 999 images with a script.
b. There are many programs that can be used to generate images from mapped netcdf rasters, including matlab/octave, IDL/gnudatalanguage, GMT5, ncarg/ncl, python, R, and julia. All these have a much larger user base than GPT and also much larger resources for development. When I think of some feature that would be nice to have in SeaDAS, I also think, maybe it is better for the NASA folks to focus on the things that can't be done with tools supported outside OBPG. I do appreciate your point about minimizing dependencies on additional tools, but I find in practice that I can't get by without R, gdal, ImageMagick, and python (python is also used in linux system scriptshead wget, so always available to many SeaDAS users). These give me quite a few options outside SeaDAS for image manipulations. Python (via beampy) can let you write scripts to do many of the GUI manipulations.
2. transparent background
I prefer to get images with transparent background because it adds flexibility. Black background is nice for screen viewing, but gives soggy printouts on my inkjet and enriches the printer makers. Again, there are 3rd party tools that support image compositing, such as ImageMagick's "compose".
3. If you aren't stuck with Windows, you can generate true colour images using l1brsgen or l3mapgen, both included in the OCSSW processing system