Default Color Map

While at lunch recently I was flipping through a recent edition of IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications and came across the following article by David Borland and Russell M. Taylor II: "Rainbow Color Map (Still) Considered Harmful." The article iterates over all the well known ways that the rainbow color map fouls up visualization. What really caught my eye, though, was that ParaView was specifically mentioned.

Inspection or documentation indicated that ParaView, Matlab, VisAD, Ensight, Iris Explorer, and AVS Express all use the rainbow color map by default. Supplied tutorials indicated that SCIRun and OpenDX use the rainbow color map by default. Amira is the only program reviewed that does not use the rainbow color map by default.

It is a little bit embarrassing to be pointed out in a national article as a bad example for visualization. Still, we are also lumped into the same category as Ensight, AVS, and SCIRun (and VisIt was never even mentioned). Nonetheless, as a world leader in visualization it would be nice to do something better or, if we can't, have a pretty good reason why not. Thus, I started my quest to find that elusive "best" color map.

Rainbow Color Map

Grayscale and Black-Body Radiation Color Maps

Isoluminant Color Maps

Brewer Color Maps

Table of Color Maps

For reference and comparison, here is a table comparing all the color maps with three different data sets. From left to right, the data sets are: a spatial contrast sensitivity function, a torus with an elevation field, and a skull with a distracting scalar field. From top to bottom, the color maps are: rainbow, grayscale, black-body radiation, isoluminant red-green, isoluminant CIE lab, and three maps derived from the ColorBrewer.