Visualizing colormap artifacts

In Evaluate and compare colormaps, I have shown how to extract and display the lightness profile of a colormap using Python. I do this routinely with colormaps, but I realize it takes an effort, and not all users may feel comfortable using code to test whether a colormap is perceptual or not.

This got me thinking that there is perhaps a need for a user-friendly, interactive tool to help identify colormap artifacts, and wondering how it would look like.

In a previous post, Comparing color palettes, I plotted the elevation for the South American continent from the Global Land One-km Base Elevation Project using four different color palettes. In Figure 1 below I plot again 3 of those: rainbow, linear lightness rainbow, and grayscale, respectively, from left to right. In maps like these some artifacts are very evident. For example there’s a classic film negative effect in the map on the left, where the Guiana Highlands and the Brazilian Highlands, both in blue, seem to stand lower than the Amazon basin, in violet. This is due to the much lower lightness (or alternatively intensity) of the colour blue compared to the violet.

South_America_maps_post

Figure 1

 

However, other artifacts are more subtle, like the inversion of the highest peaks in the Andes, which are coloured in red, relative to their surroundings, in particular the Altipiano, an endorheic basin that includes Lake Titicaca.

My idea for this tool is simple, and consists of two windows. The first is a basemap window which can display either a demo dataset or user data loaded from an ASCII grid file. In this window the user would interactively select a profile by building a polyline with point-and-click, like the one in Figure 2 in white.

South_America_map_window

Figure 2

The second window would show the elevation profile with the colour fill assigned based on the colormap, like in Figure 3 at the bottom (with colormap to the right), and with a profile of the corresponding colour intensities (on a scale 1-255) at the top.

In this view it is immediately evident that, for example, the two highest peaks near the center, coloured in red, are relative intensity lows. Another anomaly is the absolute intensity low on the right side, corresponding to the colour blue, where the elevation profile varies smoothly.

Figure 3

Figure 3

I created this concept prototype using a combination of Matlab, Python, and Surfer. I welcome suggestions for possible additional features, and would like to hear form folks interested in collaboration on a web app (ideally in Python).

Geophysical tutorial – How to evaluate and compare colormaps in Python

These below are two copies of a seismic horizon from the open source Penobscot 3D seismic survey  coloured using two different colormaps (data from Hall, 2014).

horizon_comparison

Figure 1

Do you think either of them is ‘better’?  If yes, can you explain why? If you are unsure and you want to learn how to answer such questions using perceptual principles and open source Python code, you can read my tutorial Evaluate and compare colormaps (Niccoli, 2014), one of the awesome Geophysical Tutorials from The Leading Edge. In the process you will learn many things, including how to calculate an RGB colormap’s intensity using a simple formula:

import numpy as np
ntnst = 0.2989 * rgb[:,0] + 0.5870 * rgb[:,1] + 0.1140 * rgb[:,2] # get the intensity
intensity = np.rint(ntnst) # rounds up to nearest integer

…and  how to display  the colormap as a colorbar with an overlay plot of the intensity as in Figure 2.

intensity_dots

Figure 2

 

Reference

Hall, M. (2014) Smoothing surfaces and attributes. The Leading Edge 33, no. 2, 128–129. Open access at: https://github.com/seg/tutorials#february-2014

Niccoli, M. (2014) Evaluate and compare colormaps. The Leading Edge 33, no. 8.,  910–912. Open access at: https://github.com/seg/tutorials#august-2014

Perceptual rainbow palette – the goodies

Perceptual rainbow palette – Matlab function and ASCII files

In my last post I introduced cubeYF, my custom-made perceptual lightness rainbow palette. As promised there, I am sharing the palette  with today’s post. For the Matlab users, cube YF, along with the other palettes I introduced in the series, is part of the Matlab File Exchange submission Perceptually improved colormaps.

For the non-Matlab users, please download the cubeYF here (RGB, 256 samples). You may also be interested in cube1, which has a slightly superior visual hue contrast, due to the addition of a red-like color at the high lightness end but at the cost of a modest deviation from 100% perceptual. I used cube 1 in my Visualization tips for geoscientists series.

Perceptual rainbow palette – preformatted in various software formats

The palettes are also formatted for a number of platforms and software products: Geosoft, Hampson-Russell, SMT Kingdom, Landmark Decision Space Geoscience, Madagascar, OpendTect, Python/Matplotlib, Schlumberger Petrel, Seisware, Golden Software Surfer, Paradigm Voxelgeo. Please download them from my Color Palettes page and follow instructions therein.

Another example

In Comparing color palettes I used a map of South America [1] to compare a linear lightness palette to some common rainbow palettes using  grayscale as a perceptual benchmark. Below, I am doing the same for the cubeYF colormap.

South_America_maps_CubeYF_rainbow

Comparison of South America maps using, from left to right: ROYGBIV (from this post) , classic rainbow, cubeYF, and grayscale

Again, there is little doubt in my mind that cubeYF does a superior job compared to the other two rainbow palettes as it is free of artefacts [2] and more similar to grayscale  (with the additional benefit of color).

The ROYGBIV and cubeYF map have been included in Marek Kultys’ excellent tutorial Visual Alpha-Beta-Gamma: Rudiments of Visual Design for Data Explorers, recently published  on Parsons Journal for information mapping, Volume V, Issue 1.

An online palette testing tool

Both cubeYF and cube1 feature in the colormap evaluation tool by the Data Analysis and Assessment Center at the Engineer Research and Development Center. If you want to quickly evaluate a number of palettes, this is the right tool. The tool has a collection of many palettes, organized by categories, which can be used on 5 different test image, and examined in terms of RGB components and human perception. Below here is an example using cube YF.

hpc_terrain

An idea for a palette’s mood test

A few weeks ago, thanks to Matt Hall (@kwinkunks on twitter),  I discovered Colour monitor, a great online tool by Richard Weeler (@Zephyris on twitter). You supply an image; Colour monitor analyses its colors in terms of hue, saturation and luminance and produces a graphical representation of the image’s mood [3]. I thought, what a wonderful idea!

Then I wondered: what if I used this to tell me something about a color palette’s mood? The circular histogram of colors reminded me of the Harmonic templates [4] on the hue wheel from this paper And so I created fat colorbars using the three  palettes I used in the last post, saved them as images, and run the monitor with them. Here below are the results for Matlab jet, Industry Spectrum, and cubeYF. Looking at these palettes in terms of harmony I would say that jet is not very harmonic (too large a portion of the hue circle; the T template, which is the largest, spans 180 degrees), and that the spectrum is terrible.

CubeYF is also exceeding a bit 180 degrees, but looks very close to a T template rotated by 180 degrees (rotations are allowed). So perhaps I could trim it a bit? But to me it looks a lot nicer and gives me a vibe of really good mood, and reminds me of one of those beautiful central american headdresses, like Moctezuma’s crown.

jet-clrmp-mood

Jet mood

Spectrum-industry-clrmp-mood

Spectrum mood

cubeYF-clrmp-mood

cubeYF mood

Notes

[1] Created with data from the Global Land One-km Base Elevation Project at the National Geophysical Data Center.

[2] Looking at the intensity of the colorbars may help in the assessment: the third and fourth colorbars are very similar and both look perceptually linear, whereas the first and second do not.

[3] Quoted from Richard’s blog post: “… in the middle is a circular histogram of the colours (spectral shades) in the image, and gives an idea of how much of each colour there is. Up the left is a histogram of image brightness (lightness of colour), and up the right is a histogram of colour saturation (vibrancy)”.

[4] Quoted from the paper’s abstract: “Harmonic colors are sets of colors that are aesthetically pleasing in terms of human visual perception. If you are interested in this idea there is a set of slides and a video on the author’s website

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