Abstract: This paper expounds the basic principle of the automatic hill-shading, analyzes the advantage and disadvantage between the automatic and the traditional manual hill-shading and presents a scheme of automatic hill-shading. Practices prove that the method can be used to generate fast and automatically large-extent colored hill-shading map, which meets printing and publication and can be used as fundamental background map in thematic GIS, and be applied to the mass production of colored hill-shading map.