The other odd thing I discovered at the shaded relief site is that to "look good" you need to subtly change the lighting direction depending on the feature direction. For example, if you light from 10:00, it will shade a ridge running from 1:00 to 7:00 well, but not at all shade a ridge running 10:00-4:00. So you need to light different ridgelines from slightly different direction to optimally make them stand out.

This is "simple" when hand shading, but "hard" if trying to do it programatically.

-Rob A>