Wikipedia:Graphic Lab/Resources/Creating shaded relief (GDAL, ImageMagick)

Preface
To proceed with this tutorial you need GDAL and ImageMagick, if you want to add rivers and lakes you need also some Natural Earth files. This tutorial is written to be used on Posix systems (Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows Cygwin), but with minor changes of command line commands it can be used under Windows itself.

Step 1: Prepare your folder structure
Now download the source file

Step 2: Generate hillshaded layer
Set two parameters

SIZE - the size of output file (the result will be rectangle), by general it should be power of 2 (minimum: 256, maximum: 32768) SIZEM - size using for downscaling, you can experiment with multiple values, start with SIZE divided by 4

Result:



Step 3: Prepare background
In this script SIZE should be identical as before

Result:

Step 4: Merge hillshade with background
Result: