{"id":134,"date":"2008-03-26T00:56:29","date_gmt":"2008-03-26T05:56:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2008\/house-hunting-the-geek-way-part-1-using-photoshop-to-make-heat-maps\/"},"modified":"2008-03-26T00:56:29","modified_gmt":"2008-03-26T05:56:29","slug":"house-hunting-the-geek-way-part-1-using-photoshop-to-make-heat-maps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/2008\/house-hunting-the-geek-way-part-1-using-photoshop-to-make-heat-maps\/","title":{"rendered":"House hunting the geek way, Part 1: Using Photoshop to make heat maps"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you’ve ever moved to a new city and looked for a house or apartment you know how difficult it can be.\u00a0 What neighborhood, which side of town?\u00a0 Can we live close to my wife’s workplace and not to far from mine?<\/p>\n

I thought I would share the method I used to find our last house, using Photoshop to build a heat map of the city.\u00a0 Note that this is NOT the method I used to find our current apartment – watch this space for more news on that coming up<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Step 1 – Build a map<\/strong><\/p>\n

In order to build our heat map you’ll need a base map to place everything on.\u00a0 Back in 2004 when I did this project Mapquest was still the best thing going, so that’s what I used.\u00a0 If I were doing it now, I would go with Google Maps.<\/p>\n

This is the most tedious step, since you’ll need to center your map, take a screenshot, then cut the map portion of the screenshot and paste it into your working image.\u00a0 If you have a scanner and a nice print map you’d like to use instead, feel free to go that route.<\/p>\n

You can see my example, a map for the Greater Cleveland area, below.\u00a0 Click to see a larger version.\u00a0 The inset shows you the level of street detail I found best – zoomed in close enough to see all the streets, but not so close as to make your map unusably large.<\/p>\n

\"megamap-example-plain\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Step 2 – Place your main locations<\/strong><\/p>\n

What are the three most important factors in real estate?\u00a0 Location, location, location.\u00a0 In our case we want to live close to the locations we need to go to on a regular basis.\u00a0 For us that was two workplaces and two universities.<\/p>\n

Heat maps are a great way to visualize information<\/a>.\u00a0 They are a perfectly appropriate choice for map location and distance information.\u00a0 So create a new layer in Photoshop.\u00a0 Choose the gradient tool and make sure you’re using a Radial Gradient.\u00a0 The gradient should go from a solid color (I chose blue) to transparent.\u00a0 Using the map, create a radial gradient about as wide as you would like to drive.<\/p>\n

These smooth gradients can make it hard to make distinctions when you are zoomed in and, on a large map, will take up a lot of disk space.\u00a0 So an alternative method would be to create a series of coencentric circles, each smaller than the last.\u00a0 That’s the method I used in the example below.<\/p>\n

\"megamap-example-locations\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Once you have one good circle layer, copy it for each of the locations you want on your map and drag them in to place.\u00a0 You’re probably going to want to change the blending mode for the layers so that you can still see map details – I recommend using Multiply and lowering the opacity just a bit.<\/p>\n

In my example map, you can already see how this could help narrow down which neighborhoods to look in.\u00a0 It also shows quite visually that there’s no point in trying to live closer to Kent – it doesn’t intersect with any of the other hot spots.<\/p>\n

In part 2, we’ll take a look at pulling in data maps for things like crime statistics , highlighting other map features, and pulling it all together.\u00a0 Also, I’ll have an exciting announcement about another project I’ve been working on soon as well.\u00a0 Stay tuned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you’ve ever moved to a new city and looked for a house or apartment you know how difficult it can be.\u00a0 What neighborhood, which side of town?\u00a0 Can we live close to my wife’s workplace and not to far from mine? I thought I would share the method I used to find our last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,4],"tags":[129,128,88,109,96,84,85],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-projects","tag-heat-maps","tag-hot-spot","tag-how-to","tag-information-design","tag-maps","tag-photoshop","tag-tutorial"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jasonmorrison.net\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}