The Making of Continuous Colormaps

Pascal Nardini , Min Chen , Francesca Samsel, Roxana Bujack, Michael Böttinger, Gerik Scheuermann

External link (DOI)
View presentation:2020-10-29T17:00:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2020-10-29T17:00:00Z
Exemplar figure
The figure shows a screenshot of the Edit-Section of the CCC-Tool. We introduced this tool for users to create, edit, and analyze application-specific colormaps. In this work, we present a web-based software system, CCC-Tool (short for Charting Continuous Colormaps) under the URL https://ccctool.com, for creating, editing, and analyzing application-specific colormaps. The tool uses a new notion of “colormap specification (CMS)” that maintains the essential semantics required for defining a color mapping scheme.
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Direct link to video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/t8hRk3RCCjk

Keywords

CCC-Tool, charting continuous colormaps, colormap specification, perceptual uniformity, colormap analysis

Abstract

Continuous colormaps are integral parts of many visualization techniques, such as heat-maps, surface plots, and flow visualization. Despite that the critiques of rainbow colormaps have been around and well-acknowledged for three decades, rainbow colormaps are still widely used today. One reason behind the resilience of rainbow colormaps is the lack of tools for users to create a continuous colormap that encodes semantics specific to the application concerned. In this paper, we present a web-based software system, CCC-Tool (short for Charting Continuous Colormaps) under the URL https://ccctool.com, for creating, editing, and analyzing such application-specific colormaps. We introduce the notion of “colormap specification (CMS)” that maintains the essential semantics required for defining a color mapping scheme. We provide users with a set of advanced utilities for constructing CMS's with various levels of complexity, examining their quality attributes using different plots, and exporting them to external application software. We present two case studies, demonstrating that the CCC-Tool can help domain scientists as well as visualization experts in designing semantically-rich colormaps.