Hi,
This is a great initiative, I love colormaps and am always disatisfied.
However, I am concerned about these proposed defaults. As Ben says, there are
two types of data sets: “intensity” or “density” data, and data sets with a
natural zero (i.e. positive or negative anomaly or velocity). I’d be fine with
any of the proposed colormaps for “intensity” data sets, but I would *never*
use them for anomaly data sets; I couldn’t tell where the middle (zero) of any
of those colormaps are intuitively.
Jet and parula, for all their sins, are decent compromises for the naive user
(or the user in a rush) because they do a good job of representing both types
of data. Even in black and white jet does something reasonable, which is go to
dark at extreme values and white-ish in the middle. Jet also has a nice
central green hue between blue and yellow that signals zero (or at least it
does to me after years of looking at it). I don’t see that jet really loses
that under colorblindness; in fact I almost prefer the “Moderate Deuter”
version of jet to the actual jet.
Anyways, I guess I am advocating trying to find a colormap with a very obvious
central hue to represent zero. Anomaly data sets are *very* common, so having
a default colormap that doesn’t do something reasonable with them may be a turn
off to new users.
Cheers, Jody
> On 5 Jun 2015, at 8:36 AM, Benjamin Root <ben.r...@ou.edu> wrote:
>
> It is funny that you mention that you prefer the warmer colors over the
> cooler colors. There has been some back-n-forth about which is better. I
> personally have found myself adverse to using just cool or just warm colors,
> preferring a mix of cool and warm colors. Perhaps it is my background in
> meteorology and viewing temperature maps?
>
> Another place where a mix of cool and warm colors are useful is for severity
> indications such as radar maps. It is no accident that radar maps are colored
> greens and blues for weak precipitation, then yellow for heavier, and then
> reds for heaviest (possibly severe) precipitation -- it came from the old FAA
> color guides. While we all know that that colormap is fundamentally flawed,
> there was a rationale behind it.
>
> Hopefully I will have some time today to play around with the D option. I
> want to see if I can shift the curve a bit to include more yellows and orange
> so that it can have a mix of cool and warm colors.
>
> Ben Root
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 11:21 AM, Philipp A. <flying-sh...@web.de
> <mailto:flying-sh...@web.de>> wrote:
> I vote for A and B. Only B if i get just one vote.
>
> C is too washed out and i like the warm colors more than the cold ones in D.
>
> It’s funny that this comes up while I’m handling colormaps in my own work at
> the moment.
>
> Neal Becker <ndbeck...@gmail.com <mailto:ndbeck...@gmail.com>> schrieb am
> Fr., 5. Juni 2015 um 12:58 Uhr:
> I vote for D, although I like matlab's new default even better
>
>
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--
Jody Klymak
http://web.uvic.ca/~jklymak/
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