cbarf

Real filled colorbar

Description

Similar to the well known colorbarf but more realistic.

There are two things missing in colorbar and colorbarf:
1. the colorbar ticks are scaled according to the size of each interval.
2. when color is saturated at the upper limit, or when is white, below the lower limit, a triangle is added. The triangle means "more/less than". Such information is not provided by the existing tools, colorbar and colorbarf.
See the examples.

Besides, there is a bug (?) with contourf: in some cases, even with the levels specified, one additional level is added and corrensponds to the sourrounding line! In such case, colorbarf adds one box for this fake level!

Syntax: H=CBARF(DATA,LEVELS,MODE,SCALE)

Updated 13-7-2007 by adding the option SCALE for linear/non linear scale

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the following in the creation of this submission:
colorbarf

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 6.5 (R13)

[Loic Jullion]

Great!Exactly what I needed!

[Lucio Rezende]

grande martinho ! excelente !

[K Kats]

I have been thinking about switching to another tool for contour plots, but this neat script saved me! Thank you.

[wu only]

Thank u for your work!
but I also find a bug(?) with it.

cbarf(data,lev,'vertical','nonlinear') and
cbarf(data,lev,'vertical','linear') produce different colors according to the same specified levels. The latter one is right.

[M MA]

You are right Wu. The bug is now fixed.
Thank you

[Wu Zhiyong]

Great work! Thank you!

[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.

[Chamane]

great work!

[Joseph MacGregor]

Works as advertised. I used it to produce a discretely sampled (rather than continuous) colorbar for a contourf figure. The resulting colorbar didn't behave ideally after an axes position shift, but I was able to cheat by two copies of the figure (one with a continuous colorbar and the other discrete) and copy/pasting the discrete colorbar onto the better behaved continuous figure. I didn't need the third and fourth inputs. Honestly, it seems like it should be able to work with just the second input (LEVELS) somehow...

Thanks very much for producing this script.

[Manoj]

Excellent job, but it always get behind the plot on printing or saving. Need to fix it.

[Makarand]

I have one problem, can we use it with pcolor
I tried it to use with pcolor as follows
%%%%
X=1:10;Y=1:10;
C=rand(10,10)*150;
colormap(jet);
L=[10 20 50 60 70 100];
contourf(X,Y,C,L);
pcolor(X,Y,C);
cbarf(C,L);
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
The yellow (an extra) color is there on plot but not in the colorbar.
I have one more question: is it possible to equally space the colors in the colorbar

[Manoj]

When I use HSV colormap the lowest and highest value band getting same color.

[Manoj]

Oh that's default not bug of cbarf. HSV has circular colour pattern.

[Sam]

When I use cbarf the levels are not labeled on the colorbar. I have levels -0.5:0.1:0.5. and for some reason only 0.2 is labeled. Any suggestions on how to correct this? Other than that, this is a great tool. Exactly what I have been looking for.

[Christopher Wolfe]

I have the same problem as Sam. It's due to the use of yt=intersect(yt,L(a:b+1)) on line 214 to select the labels. Somehow rounding errors can make yt and L different by as small multiple of eps, so these labels are excluded by intersect. I work around it by manually resetting the colorbar's 'YTick' property after a call to cbarf.

[Christopher Wolfe]

By the way, cbarf is otherwise great!