ENVI files and ArcGIS 10

[VictoriaHill1]

I have been having some major trouble opening files in ArcMap10 that i have processed using IDL and ENVI. I have tried saving my ENVI files with the extension .dat or .img and also saving them as Arcview rasters or Erdas files. While i am able to open them in ArcMap 10, they come up with values from 3.4 +038 to -3.4+038 when the actual values in the pixels are either 0, 1 or 2.

Even when i am able to force the symbology to classified to give me the real values of 0, 1 and 2  it will then refuse to draw the layer, and I am unable to run the raster to polygon program.

It seems like it shouldn't be so difficult, my ENVI files are in integers.

Thank you for any advise.
Yours
Victoria

[RobertBerger]

Hi,

Can you try to calculate statistics in ArcGIS on the files in question? It sounds like the files are read in as floating point data.

Robert

[VictoriaHill1]

Thanks for the reply. Yes, my problem seemed to be that my values were floats, i converted my numbers back to integers in IDL (using fix) and now they work. Another issue was that i had to copy the projection info from another file as for some reason the data was not being projected properly.

So i have learned that all my values should be floats, does mean that i can never bring in data that has a decimal place? Or is there some other method.

Now i wish that i had started in ERDAS, but alas i am a long time ENVI user.
Thank you

[RobertBerger]

Greetings,

Even floating point data shouldn't be an issue. Simply calculate statistics on the floating point dataset and then the data should display fine.

Robert