The Making of Continuous Colormaps
Pascal Nardini , Min Chen , Francesca Samsel, Roxana Bujack, Michael Böttinger, Gerik Scheuermann
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View presentation:2020-10-29T17:00:00ZGMT-0600Change your timezone on the schedule page
2020-10-29T17:00:00Z
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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.