colormap_util

Abstract

Our Python module, colormap_module, presented here can be used to analyze and manipulate colormaps and has two main aims: (i) compare existing and new custom colormaps quantitatively by comparing their values in a color space, called CAM02-UCS, that directly shows how a human perceives their hue, saturation, and lightness values and (ii) create isoluminant colormaps from existing or custom colormaps and (iii) mix isoluminant colormap data with a 4th dimension of data by manipulating lightness values across the image and present the new image. Our module was designed to be a tool for the community to use as a whole, allowing scientists to present, analyze, and manipulate colormaps they have created and/or decided to use for a particular type of data. By being able to do this, the scientific community as a whole will think more about the colormaps they choose, see why particular colormaps are bad to use for certain types of data, and move toward using colormaps our eyes can interpret much more efficiently.