Most of the time, ESRI software is great, it does [mostly] what you ask it and as long as you aren’t doing anything too crazy it behaves. We all know that it has it’s ‘unique-ness’ about it, after using it for a few years you start to ask “why don’t they do this….” or “How comes I can’t do that…..”. Well, a lot of this is being addressed in ArcGIS Pro, already it has answered the question as to why we needed 3 different GIS software (ArcGIS Desktop, ArcScene & ArcGlobe) by bundling it all up into one package. Now (with 1.3) we are starting to see other features which we always wanted in ArcGIS Desktop coming into ArcGIS Pro, case in point, converting symbology to grayscale.

Today, I discovered while creating a basemap, that ESRI have implemented a couple of neat little touches, firstly RGB VALUES ON HOVER.

Hovering the mouse provides RGB values

Although this isn’t ground breaking, it is a nice little touch which, for us cartophiles and OCD cartographers, provides a quick and easy bit of feedback.

The other discovery was having the option to grayscale the symbology. The new ArcGIS Pro can be a little tricky to get your head around, so it is understandibly not obvious but I went to change the RGB values on a piece of road and found another option: GRAYSCALE

Grayscale dropdown

Selecting “Grayscale” takes you to this menu:

Grayscale removes colour while retaining it’s presence.

Okay, so this isn’t groundbreaking BUT having played with photoshop a little, I’ve found that the RGB value which is automatically given is almost a perfect match for what you get if you desaturate the colour.

What does all this mean? It means that you can easily and confidently convert your vector symbology to grayscale without guesswork! Creating alternative grayscale maps should now be a lot easier! Now, the question is, will this ever make it to ArcGIS Desktop?!

Dragons8mycat