Good Colour Maps: How to Design Them

Understand

Many colour maps provided by vendors have highly uneven perceptual contrast over their range.

• It is not uncommon for colour maps to have perceptual flat spots that can hide a feature as large as one tenth of the total data range.
• Colour maps may also have perceptual discontinuities that induce the appearance of false features.
• Previous work in the design of perceptually uniform colour maps has mostly failed to recognise that CIELAB space is only designed to be perceptually uniform at very low spatial frequencies.