How Bad Is Your Colormap? (2014)

Re:How Bad Is Your Colormap? (2014) by oasisbob on Saturday April 13, 2019 @01:52AM (#19651318)

Are there any articles out there that give advice on choosing/adjusting color maps for a particular situation?

I understand why some maps are awful, but have had a hard time finding a color map which I like perceptually for interpreting LIDAR forest canopy maps.

I've tried using viridis and a few others, but exceptionally tall trees get lost in the noise (not enough contrast), especially when using transparency to overlay canopy height on the LIDAR intensity data.

Is this just a case of not clamping the ends of the range properly?

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Re:How Bad Is Your Colormap? (2014) by semi-extrinsic on Saturday April 13, 2019 @02:57AM (#19651477)

I guess if your underlying data is not uniform, a uniform color map isn't going to do great?

Say, if you have a bimodal underlying distribution and you're interested in coloring according to quantiles, you want to have a similarly bimodally distributed color map.

The easiest way to achieve this is to compute the quantiles for your data set, and color by that (rather than height).

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Re:How Bad Is Your Colormap? (2014) by growlist on Saturday April 13, 2019 @11:32AM (#19653554)

Have you seen this?

http://colorbrewer2.org/#type=sequential&scheme=BuGn&n=3

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