Chasing Rainbows: A Color-Theoretic Framework for Improving and Preserving Bad Colormaps

摘要

The scientific visualization community increasingly questions the use of rainbow colormaps. This is not unfounded as significant problems are readily seen in a luminance plot of the rainbow col-ormap. Many good, generally applicable colormaps are proposed as direct replacements for the rainbow. However, there are still many who choose rainbows and like them. Would a colormap with perfect luminance and the chromaticity of a rainbow find a wider audience? This was our motivation in studying the range of chromatic effects arising from luminance corrections. Consequently we developed a framework for adjusting colormaps to various degrees which produces favorable results on a wide range of colormaps. In this work we will detail this framework and demonstrate its effectiveness on several colormaps.