An orthophoto is a differentially rectified image, meaning that all distortions are removed, including those caused by changes in ground elevation. The geo-referenced imagery will therefore fit exactly to the corresponding planimetric data, or can be used to make XY measurements on its own.

     At Mapmaker any project that needs topo already has the necessary DTM collected, which makes generating the orthophoto imagery an easily affordable addition to most projects. Our software does an excellent job of balancing the tones and mosaicing the photography automatically. For areas where manual editing is necessary, and to remove any dust or scratches that were present in the original imagery, our staff has years of experience in image manipulation.

     "True" orthos, where even structures above the surface are corrected, can also be generated. This requires more work on our part, but can still be reasonably priced. Bridges are always corrected as a part of our standard procedure.

     The digital files are usually delivered as geo-referenced TIFF or JPEG files and are ready to use in the ESRI family of software products. For use in AutoCAD environments, we supply imagery already registered and xref-ed so you don't have to.