Creating on-the-fly products

Users often want several different representations of image data (examples below). Rather than writing more data to disk, it is recommended to use the power of the mosaic dataset to create alternative products on demand, using on-the-fly processing functions. This is applicable for datasets greater than 3 bands, or multiyear collections, but if you will be serving cached tile imagery, this section is typically not applicable.

Refer to the Standard Workflow for different options for using raster functions. Examples of different output products applicable to preprocessed orthophoto data with 4 spectral bands could include RGB color, color infrared, and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), each selectable by year.