There's a kind of colourmap which is a luminance gradient in a single hue, repeated over and over again with different hues. See the various "ramps" colourmaps

There's a kind of colourmap which is a luminance gradient in a single hue, repeated over and over again with different hues. See the various "ramps" colourmaps in ImageJ (where colourmaps are called "look-up tables", or LUTs): http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/cpt-city/imagej/index.html http://soliton.vm.bytemark.co.uk/pub/cpt-city/imagej/index.h... I've seen it with a single hue as well. This kind of colourmap makes it really easy to see contours. The tradeoff is that it's hard to make comparisons between distant areas of the image.