ColorMeasures

Welcome to ColorMeasures.org.  We have created an online tool to enable you to mathematically analyze the properties of a colormap in multiple color spaces.  Please use the navigation links above to find instructions or example colormaps.  Open the tool  to give it a try.

The mathematical measures calculated by the ColorMeasures tool are described in a paper presented at IEEE VIS 2017: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: A Theoretical Framework for the Assessment of Continuous Colormaps.  These measures can help you to understand both local and global perceptual properties of the colormap tested.  These properties include: uniformity, discriminative power, and order.  The measures are calculated in CIELAB-1976, CIELAB-2000 and CIECAM-2002 color spaces.  By understanding the properties of your colormap, we hope you will be able to make a more appropriate colormap choice for your data and task.  

If you use our ColorMeasures tool, please cite our paper: @inproceedings{Bujack2017good, title={The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: A Theoretical Framework for the Assessment of Continuous Colormaps}, author={Roxana Bujack and Terece L. Turton and Francesca Samsel and Colin Ware and David H. Rogers and James Ahrens}, booktitle={ IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics}, volume={PP}, number={99}, pages={}, year={2017}, organization={IEEE},}

Acknowledgements

Funding for this project was created under a grant from the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Research Computing (Dr. Lucy Nowell, Program Manager).