colorGray

Creates full spectrum, blue-green-orange-salmon, colormap that maps to linear grayscale.

Description

Creates a broad range color map that looks good in color as well as when reduced to grayscale for low cost publication.

Finished colormap encodes small values with a bluish color, intermediate values in green to orange, and large values with a redish/salmon color. The greyscale is linear.

RGBcolormap=colorGray(numberOfLevels,makeDebugPlot);

• Acknowledgements: This submission has inspired the following:; Bipolar Colormap
• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.2 (R2006a)

[Evan Variano]

Colormap that unites grayscale and full color - hooray! - Where have you been all my life?!

[Will Robertson]

Great for large numbers of levels, but quite poor for just a few (e.g., if you're labelling three or four lines on a plot). In fact, the code breaks for numberOfLevels < 3. But I don't believe that's the goal of the package, so that's okay.

[Garret B]

Alex is my hero!

[Manuel Guizar]

The code works well but it does not use the entire gray scale range.

[Oliver Woodford]

I wrote something like this (independently) myself. However, it is full greyscale (i.e. black to white) and has a wider gamut of colours. It is available as the 'contrast' colourmap of the SC package (id 16233), which also has other "colour to gray" colourmaps too: 'earth', 'pinker', 'pastel'.

[Ondrej]

 

[Ondrej]

What about adding a next optional parameter which would set the "darkness/lightness", such that the mapping between color and grayscale wouldn't be linear.
Easy way how to do is to add a line, e.g.
RGBmap = brighten(RGBmap,0.2)
The problem is, however, that the mapping is not smooth (as can be seen on the plot, if I do e.g. colorGray(100,1)).

[Ondrej]

Other suggestion is to add line:

colormap(rgb2gray(RGBmap));colorbar

in the debugplot option to see the resulting grayscale.