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).

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.

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