Clipping a raster using a shapefile

Sometimes, you need to use a subset of an image which covers an area of interest for a project. In fact, areas of an image outside your area of interest can distract your audience from the idea you are trying to convey. Clipping a raster to a vector boundary allows you to only use the portions of the raster you need. It can also save processing time by eliminating areas outside your area of interest.

Getting ready

We will use the SatImage raster again, available at the following URL if you haven't downloaded it from the previous recipes:

https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/SatImage.zip

Place this raster in your /qgis_data/rasters directory.

How to do it...

Clipping is a common operation and GDAL is well suited for it. Perform the following steps:

1. First, in the QGIS Python Console, import the processing module:

           import processing 
   

2. Next, run the processing command specifying the input image name as the second argument and the output image...