10

Are there standard color schemes defined for surface plots of pgfplots?

Like the summer, winter, jet etc.. of Matlab.

Matlab colormap

Improve this question
16

There are a lot of standard colormaps defined in PGFPlots. For that have a look at at the PGFPlots manual (v1.14)

  • section "Predefined Colormaps" which is a subsection of section 4.7.6 on page 194,
  • section 5.3 Colormaps on page 419, which is the description of the library with the same name and provides colormaps of the free Matlab package "SC -- powerful image rendering" of Oliver Woodford, and
  • section 5.2 ColorBrewer which shows how to access the famous colormaps from http://colorbrewer2.org.

Of course you can also create your own colormaps either from scratch or combine colormaps from already existing ones or newly created. Here I present an example which is copied from the manual

\documentclass[border=5pt]{standalone}
\usepackage{pgfplots}
    \pgfplotsset{
        compat=1.14,
    }
\begin{document}
    \begin{tikzpicture}
        \begin{axis}[
            view={0}{90},
            colormap={whiteblue}{color=(blue) color=(white)},
            colormap={gb}{color=(green) color=(yellow)
                color=(brown)},
            colorbar horizontal,
            colorbar style={minor x tick num=1},
            y dir=reverse,
        ]
            %  The table file is packed into the archive
            % `doc/latex/pgfplots/pgfplots.doc.src.tar.bz2'
            \addplot3 [
                contour filled={
                    levels from colormap={
                        of colormap={
                            whiteblue,
                            target pos max=,
                            target pos={-12000,-10000,-6000,
                                -5000,-3000,-1000,-750,-500,
                                -250,-100,-50,0}
                        },
                        of colormap={
                            gb,
                            target pos min=,
                            target pos={10,100,200,500,1000,
                                1100,1200, 1500,2000,4000,
                                6000,8000}
                        },
                    },
                },
            ] table {heightmap.dat};
        \end{axis}
    \end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}

image showing the result of above code

Improve this answer
2
  • oyf... you accidentally picked the worst but works well for such data – percusse Jan 29 '17 at 1:05
  • 2
    @percusse, I chose this because it shows a lot of the possibilities that can be "done" with colormaps in PGFPlots. That are in this case: 1. You can create your own colormaps, 2. you can combine different colormaps, 3. they can be "sampled" (linearly), and 4. they can be sampled non-linearly. – Stefan Pinnow Jan 29 '17 at 6:18
17

For a quick solution, I add the following here (activate with \pgfplotsset{colormap/<name>}):

viridis

enter image description here

hot

enter image description here

hot2

enter image description here

jet

enter image description here

blackwhite

enter image description here

bluered

enter image description here

cool

enter image description here

greenyellow

enter image description here

redyellow

enter image description here

violet

enter image description here

Improve this answer
2

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.