Isolate Map Features

Isolate Map Features in Adobe Photoshop — with two ready prompts: the immediate one, and the one that makes it stick. 1 real situation leads here.

2prompt heights
1situation
1role does it
Open it in the interactive atlas →

The moments that lead here

If one of these is your afternoon, you are in the right place.

Lift buildings, roads, and water features cleanly off an aerial photo so each can be styled separately.

2 ready prompts

Written for the moment this actually comes up.

Execute — do the immediate task

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Lift buildings, roads, and water features off the aerial photo so each can be styled separately:…
Lift buildings, roads, and water features off the aerial photo so each can be styled separately: auto-select buildings, roads, and water in turn, create a layer mask for each selection, and save as named layers Buildings, Roads, Water with masks intact.

Improve — make it easier to accept

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Make approvals faster for the cartography team by refining each automatic selection with a quick…
Make approvals faster for the cartography team by refining each automatic selection with a quick edge mask pass — preserve roof eaves and narrow road shoulders, remove haloing at water edges, and deliver a short note listing areas where manual touch-up was needed for the GIS analyst.

Who does this, and with what

The same task is different work inside a different job.

Cartographer / GIS MapperAdobe PhotoshopAdobe Illustratoralso: Separate Building Layersalso: Prepare Stylable Assets

Next to this one

Other cut-out work people do in Adobe Photoshop.

Every task here came from the work, not from a feature list — which is why the prompts name what you want done and never the button that does it. The tool changes; the work does not.
Copyright © LLOS.ai · 2026 — original pedagogy, voice, and design — all rights reserved.

The rest of the map

Same library, five ways in.