Kenneth Moreland
In the 2009 paper, Diverging Color Maps for Scientific Visualization, Kenneth Moreland of Sandia National Laboratories describes a method to systematically generate attractive diverging colour-maps. His algorithm has been implemented in the Visualization Toolkit and we present here some maps produced with it, including the cool-warm scheme commended in Moreland's paper as follows:
This paper recommends a good default color map for general purpose scientific visualization. The color map derived here is an all-around good performer: it works well for low and high frequency data, orders the data, is perceptually linear, behaves well for observers with color-deficient vision, and has reasonably low impact on the shading of three-dimensional surfaces.
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