Composite Bands (Data Management)

Usage tips

• The order that the bands are listed in Multi-value Input control box will determine the order of the bands in the output raster dataset.

• You can save your output to BMP, GIF, GRID, IMG, JPEG, JPEG 2000, PNG, TIFF, or any geodatabase raster dataset.

• When storing a raster dataset in a geodatabase, no file extension should be added to the name of the raster dataset. When storing the raster dataset in a file format, you need to specify the file extension: .bmp for BMP, .gif for GIF, .img for an ERDAS IMAGINE file, .jpg for JPEG, .jp2 for JPEG 2000, .png for PNG, .tif for TIFF, or no extension for GRID.

• When storing your raster dataset to a geodatabase, you can specify a compression type and compression quality within the Raster Storage Settings in the Environment Settings dialog box.

• The output raster dataset takes the cell size from the first raster band in the list.

• By default, the output raster dataset takes the extent and the spatial reference of the first raster band with a spatial reference in the list. You can change this by setting Output Extent and Output Coordinate System in the Environment Settings.

• The following are some examples of why you would want to combine single raster datasets into multiband raster datasets.

  • You may have received some satellite data where each band of data is contained in a single file — for example, band1.tif, band2.tif, and band3.tif. In order to render these raster datasets together to create a color composite, each band needs to be contained within a single raster dataset (for example, allbands.tif)
  • You may have several raster datasets of the same area captured at various times. By displaying these raster datasets as a color composite, you can detect change in the area, such as urban growth or cut forests. To create this color composite each raster dataset needs to be contained as individual bands within a single raster dataset.
  • In some cases, the output of an analysis operation is a single-band raster dataset and you may need to combine the outputs to do further visual analysis by rendering your data as a color composite.
  • Combining bands together can help you organize many related single-band rasters into one raster dataset.

• The following environments affect this tool: current workspace, scratch workspace, output coordinate system, output extent, output CONFIG keyword, pyramid, raster statistics, compression, and tile size.

Command line syntax
An overview of the Command Line window
CompositeBands_management <in_rasters;in_rasters...> <out_raster>

Command line example

CompositeBands_management D:\Rasters\band1;D:\Rasters\band2;D:\Rasters\band3 D:\Rasters\Composite123.img

Scripting syntax
About getting started with writing geoprocessing scripts
CompositeBands_management (in_rasters, out_raster)

Script example

# Create the geoprocessing object
import arcgisscripting
gp = arcgisscripting.create()

gp.workspace = "c:/seattle_data"
gp.CompositeBands_management("seattle1.tif;seattle2.img;seattle3.tif","seattle_composite.tif")