Cyan Ching

Cyan Ching

Postdoctoral researcher working in method development for microscopy image processing.

This could be your favourite colourblind-friendly wide dynamic range colour map

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Published:

This is my current favourite replacement for jet, or any other ‘rainbow-like’ colour map. It is based on the Okabe-Ito palette, which is designed to be colourblind-friendly, and extended into a continuous map with a pleasantly wide dynamic range. I am mildly offended that this is not already included in Matplotlib as a built-in colormap.

If you are curious about how colourblind people actually perceive colour (and why palettes like this matter), this is a genuinely fascinating read, and the source of this palette:

Access the link here

You are very welcome to take the following code and use it in your own plots.

from matplotlib.colors import LinearSegmentedColormap
import matplotlib.colors as mcolors


def okabe_ito_cmap(n: int = 256) -> LinearSegmentedColormap:
    """
    Continuous colour map built from the Okabe-Ito colourblind-friendly palette.
    (Black excluded to avoid confusion with NaNs or annotations.)
    """
    colors = [
        "#0072B2",  # Blue
        "#56B4E9",  # Sky blue
        "#009E73",  # Bluish green
        "#F0E442",  # Yellow
        "#E69F00",  # Orange
        "#D55E00",  # Vermilion
        "#CC79A7",  # Reddish purple
    ]
    return mcolors.LinearSegmentedColormap.from_list("okabe_ito", colors, N=n)

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