Image Processing Toolbox

Understanding Handle Graphics Object Property Settings

When you display an indexed, intensity, binary, or RGB image, imshow sets the Handle Graphics properties that control how the image is displayed. The following table lists the relevant properties and their settings for each type of image. The table uses standard toolbox terminology to refer to the various image types: X represents an indexed image, I represents an intensity image, BW represents a binary image, and RGB represents an RGB (or truecolor) image.

Note    When you use the imshow automatic scaling syntax, imshow(I,[]), the function sets the axes CLim property to [min(J(:)) max(J(:))]. CDataMapping is always scaled for intensity images, so that the value min(J(:)) is displayed using the first colormap color, and the value max(J(:)) is displayed using the last colormap color.

Handle Graphics Property	Indexed Images	Intensity (Grayscale) Images	Binary Images	RGB (Truecolor) Images
CData (Image)	Set to the data in X	Set to the data in I	Set to data in BW	Set to data in RGB
CDataMapping (Image)	Set to 'direct'	Set to 'scaled'	Set to 'direct'	Ignored when CData is 3-D
CLim (Axes)	Does not apply	double: [0 1] uint8:  [0 255] uint16: [0 65535]	Set to [0 1]	Ignored when CData is 3-D
Colormap (Figure)	Set to data in map	Set to grayscale colormap	Set to a grayscale colormap whose values range from black to white	Ignored when CData is 3-D

Viewing Multiple Images

Displaying Different Image Types