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I think it is just misuse. Rainbow colormaps show banding, which is great when you want to have an idea of contour shapes. For example, the most common rainbow
by GuB-42 5y ago
I think it is just misuse.
Rainbow colormaps show banding, which is great when you want to have an idea of contour shapes. For example, the most common rainbow colormap, "jet" is great at showing jet engine exhaust plumes, hence the name.
But if the value matter more than the shape, then it is terrible. The same banding that highlight shapes create artificial discontinuities in otherwise smooth data.
Maybe it is like the Comic Sans of color maps. It serves a purpose. In the case of Comic Sans, it was made to give a comic font to the comic characters of Microsoft Bob. And people liked it and used it everywhere, much to the dismay of typographers. "Jet" serves a purpose, but people misuse it because it looks cool.
- yongjik 5y agoI think the problem is that rainbow shows banding, but only in some arbitrary narrow range, and then pretty much ignores a large swath of values that all map to slightly different hues of green. So the "bands" you see are not representative of the underlying data, unless you're lucky. If you want to see bands I think you're better served by just digitizing the value into, say, 10 ranges, and color each range in uniform color, like how they did it in old-school paper maps.