Colormaps

2014-10-14

While implementing the reader for GGF format I needed some test data and examples. A couple of articles on Wikipedia about bilinear interpolation and bicubic interpolation had examples in Matlab with some nice color maps. I was trying to implement the same examples in Mathcad and wanted to get the same colormap (palette).

Jet Colormap #

A question on StackOverflow combined with another article helped me find a Mathcad implementation:

Very similar to jet colormap is the turbo colormap:

Haxby Colormap #

Also found a nice colormap - Haxby colormap:

Parula Colormap #

Around 2011, Mathlab has replaced the default jet colormap with a new one called “Parula”

Here is a graph of the RGB components:

Viridis Colormap #

In 2015 a new colormap, Viridis, was introduced

The graph of color components is quite similar to Parula:

More links related to color maps: #

• Color Brewer 2
• Mastering Multi-hued Color Scales with Chroma.js
• Default colormaps: Are Parula and Viridis really an improvement over Jet?
• Introduction to the viridis color maps
• Optimizing colormaps with consideration for color vision deficiency to enable accurate interpretation of scientific data