colorbarf

Add an accurate colorbar to your filled contour plot.

Description

This m-file produces a colorbar with solid blocks of color between the contour levels that correspond precisely to the colors in the filled contour plot. This is in contrast to the standard MATLAB colorbar which simply plots all the colors in the colormap and, therefore, only approximates what is being plotted in the filled contour plot.

• Acknowledgements: This submission has inspired the following:; cbarf
• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7 (R14)

[Mads Hvid Nielsen]

 

[Nikolaos Skaropoulos]

 

[Robert Weinmann]

Very good.

[Felix Jose]

Very handy and expressive for presentations

[r pearson]

This program was not working when I downloaded it. I would get the error:
Error in ==> colorbarf at 151
   colors(j) = get(H(j),'CData'); % get the color used to fill the
patches
This was with version 7 even if I used the 'v6' option.
I made these changes and it works now:
%Modded by R Pearson
for j = 1:length(H)
% colors(j)= get(H(j),'CData'); % get the color used to fill the patches
   tempcolors = get(H(j),'CData'); % get the color used to fill the patches
   colors(j)=tempcolors(1,1)
end
%%%%%End Pearson

I worked after this but I don't know if it is the right way to do this. I don't endorse this method at all. It simply works for me in my limited usage.

[Dan S]

Can this utility be modified to work with the surf function?

I need a color bar on a surface plot but the scale on the built in colorbar is inaccurate since it's divided into 64 segments instead of the 5 integer divisions that I need.

[Jean-Marie Ndambi]

 

[Alan Drew]

Every time I plot a slightly different subset of my array (e.g from contourf(y(50:150),x(50:150),positron(50:150,50:150)) to contourf(y(70:130),x(70:130),positron(70:130,70:130)) ) the axis get smaller but the colorbarf remains the same size. As a consequence, if I am optimising the display of my figure, I have to keep closing the figure window.

[onur kerimoglu]

Exactly what I was looking for. I don't understand why it was not built-in. Thanks.

[Brian Magi]

A really useful function for a much better colorbar option. This is probably a simple change, but i don't know enough about handle graphics. When i change the position of the colorbar from cbarf to somewhere in the plot, cbarf is always behind the main plot. I tried changing 'Layer' to top (and the main plot to bottom) but to no avail. if anyone has what is probably a quick solution, i'd appreciate it.

[Shannon Fargey]

can colourbarf be used with pcolor instead of contourf? if so what modifications would have to be made?

[Albert Drif]

does it support log scale? Like colorbar('Yscale','log')? I know I can convert the data to log10 first, but the ticks of colorbarf becomes -2 -1 0 1 2, which I want it display as 10^{-2} 10^{-1} 10^{0} 10^{1} 10^{2}, like in Latex. Thx