May 21st, 2013 | 1 Comment
As you may have noted, gnuplot and Matlab have different default color maps. Designing such a default map is not easy, because they should handle a lot of different things (Moreland, 2009):
– The map yields images that are aesthetically pleasing
– The map has a maximal perceptual resolution
– Interference with the shading of 3D surfaces is minimal
– The map is not sensitive to vision deficiencies
– The order of the colors should be intuitively the same for all people
– The perceptual interpolation matches the underlying scalars of the map
To use the default color map proposed by Moreland, just download default.plt and store it to a path, that is available to gnuplot. For example store it under
/home/username/.gnuplotting/default.plt and add the following line to your
set loadpath "/home/username/.gnuplotting"
After that you can just load the palette before your plot command via
In Fig. 2 the same plot is shown using the default color map from gnuplot, which is a little bit dark in my opinion.
Figure 3 shows the jet color map from Matlab, which is a classical rainbow map with all its pros and cons.