othercolor

Extra colormaps for plotting. Contains diverging, sequential, categorical, and perceptual maps.
10.6K Downloads
Updated 2 Mar 2011

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This is an embarrassingly simple function to augment the currently available MATLAB colormaps. It works as a seamless replacement for the current maps like jet and hsv. So to use it you just call colormap(othercolor('colorname')). The function handles interpolating to any number of points (othercolor('colorname',numpoints)) and uses the current axis as the reference if numpoints is not specified.

The available maps are stored in the file colorData.mat and you can easily add your own maps. To get a list of available names just call othercolor() without any arguments.

The 400+ colormaps are from 3 sources:
Mathematica (indexed, physical, gradient, and named)
http://geography.uoregon.edu/datagraphics/color_scales.htm
http://www.colorbrewer2.org

Some of these maps are better suited for sets of bar or line plots (particularly the qualitative sets). In those cases the last number in the name is the number of indexed colors, so it would probably be fitting to set M to that number to avoid interpolation. Example:

>> figure
>> colorscheme = othercolor('Set16',6);
>> set(gcf,'DefaultAxesColorOrder',colorscheme);
>> plot(rand(6,20));
>> legend(num2str((1:6)'))

* I'm looking for ideas on how to best organize these maps now that there are 400+ of them. If you have suggestions please leave them in the comments or send me an email.

Cite As

Joshua Atkins (2024). othercolor (https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/30564-othercolor), MATLAB Central File Exchange. Retrieved .

MATLAB Release Compatibility
Created with R2010a
Compatible with any release
Platform Compatibility
Windows macOS Linux
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othercolor/

Version Published Release Notes
1.7.0.0

Added all the colormaps from Mathematica.
Note: the "physical" and "gradient" maps are Mathematica functions, so they were sampled at 64 linearly spaced rgb points from 0 to 1 to fit with the MATLAB default.

1.6.0.0

Included Oleg's suggestion to get rid of eval() statements.
Added ability to index colors numerically.
Added 200+ new colormaps from colorbrewer2.org
Added image files with pictures of the colormaps.

1.0.0.0