I have updated the Brewer color tables that I posted last fall. The download includes MG_LOADCT and MG_XLOADCT, which are wrappers around LOADCT and XLOADCT that use the Brewer color tables instead of the default color tables.
The update fixes the qualitative color tables. These color tables are for labeling, so they contain 3 to 12 colors instead of a full set of 256 colors. The qualitative color tables each have multiple versions included, depending on how many colors are needed. For example, “Pastel1″ has versions with 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9 colors.
In total, there are 18 sequential, 9 diverging, and 58 qualitative color tables (of 8 different styles). The order of the tables (sequential first, then the diverging, and then ending with all the variations of the qualitative) was also changed to match the Brewer order instead of the previous alphabetical listing. Here’s a list of all the tables:
0. YlGn (Sequential)
1. YlGnBu (Sequential)
2. GnBu (Sequential)
3. BuGn (Sequential)
4. PuBuGn (Sequential)
5. PuBu (Sequential)
6. BuPu (Sequential)
7. RdPu (Sequential)
8. PuRd (Sequential)
9. OrRd (Sequential)
10. YlOrRd (Sequential)
11. YlOrBr (Sequential)
12. Purples (Sequential)
13. Blues (Sequential)
14. Greens (Sequential)
15. Oranges (Sequential)
16. Reds (Sequential)
17. Greys (Sequential)
18. PuOr(Diverging)
19. BrBG(Diverging)
20. PRGn(Diverging)
21. PiYG(Diverging)
22. RdBu(Diverging)
23. RdGy(Diverging)
24. RdYlBu(Diverging)
25. Spectral(Diverging)
26. RdYlGn(Diverging)
27. Set3 (Qualitative) - 3 colors
28. Set3 (Qualitative) - 4 colors
29. Set3 (Qualitative) - 5 colors
30. Set3 (Qualitative) - 6 colors
31. Set3 (Qualitative) - 7 colors
32. Set3 (Qualitative) - 8 colors
33. Set3 (Qualitative) - 9 colors
34. Set3 (Qualitative) - 10 colors
35. Set3 (Qualitative) - 11 colors
36. Set3 (Qualitative) - 12 colors
37. Pastel1 (Qualitative) - 3 colors
38. Pastel1 (Qualitative) - 4 colors
39. Pastel1 (Qualitative) - 5 colors
40. Pastel1 (Qualitative) - 6 colors
41. Pastel1 (Qualitative) - 7 colors
42. Pastel1 (Qualitative) - 8 colors
43. Pastel1 (Qualitative) - 9 colors
44. Set1 (Qualitative) - 3 colors
45. Set1 (Qualitative) - 4 colors
46. Set1 (Qualitative) - 5 colors
47. Set1 (Qualitative) - 6 colors
48. Set1 (Qualitative) - 7 colors
49. Set1 (Qualitative) - 8 colors
50. Set1 (Qualitative) - 9 colors
51. Pastel2 (Qualitative) - 3 colors
52. Pastel2 (Qualitative) - 4 colors
53. Pastel2 (Qualitative) - 5 colors
54. Pastel2 (Qualitative) - 6 colors
55. Pastel2 (Qualitative) - 7 colors
56. Pastel2 (Qualitative) - 8 colors
57. Set2 (Qualitative) - 3 colors
58. Set2 (Qualitative) - 4 colors
59. Set2 (Qualitative) - 5 colors
60. Set2 (Qualitative) - 6 colors
61. Set2 (Qualitative) - 7 colors
62. Set2 (Qualitative) - 8 colors
63. Dark2 (Qualitative) - 3 colors
64. Dark2 (Qualitative) - 4 colors
65. Dark2 (Qualitative) - 5 colors
66. Dark2 (Qualitative) - 6 colors
67. Dark2 (Qualitative) - 7 colors
68. Dark2 (Qualitative) - 8 colors
69. Paired (Qualitative) - 3 colors
70. Paired (Qualitative) - 4 colors
71. Paired (Qualitative) - 5 colors
72. Paired (Qualitative) - 6 colors
73. Paired (Qualitative) - 7 colors
74. Paired (Qualitative) - 8 colors
75. Paired (Qualitative) - 9 colors
76. Paired (Qualitative) - 10 colors
77. Paired (Qualitative) - 11 colors
78. Paired (Qualitative) - 12 colors
79. Accent (Qualitative) - 3 colors
80. Accent (Qualitative) - 4 colors
81. Accent (Qualitative) - 5 colors
82. Accent (Qualitative) - 6 colors
83. Accent (Qualitative) - 7 colors
84. Accent (Qualitative) - 8 colors
February 21st, 2008 at 11:22 am
[...] I updated the color tables to fix problems with the qualitative color tables and added new routines to access [...]
April 19th, 2008 at 7:47 am
Thanks a lot for those. I have thought using those color tables since I saw the Brewer article in EOS, but never implemented more than one in my IDL codes.
I have a little concern about the interpolation to 256 colors you used to produce the tbl file. The diverging color tables seem a little bit off-center: you expect to have a clear neutral middle color (even though not in the table itself), but in the RdBu for example the 121-127 indices seem to be on the “blue side”. No too much of an issue when loading very few or a lot of colors, but may bother some users loading 20-40 colors?
IDL> loadct, 22, file=file_which(‘brewer.tbl’) % LOADCT: Loading table RdBu(Diverging) IDL> cindex IDL> loadct, 22, file=file_which(‘brewer.tbl’), ncolo=16 % LOADCT: Loading table RdBu(Diverging) IDL> cindex IDL> loadct, 22, file=file_which(‘brewer.tbl’), ncolo=64 % LOADCT: Loading table RdBu(Diverging) IDL> cindex
April 19th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
I’ll take a look at that.
My most recent version has different values for the qualitative color tables since it seemed silly to have a separate color table for each number of colors (since the 7 color version is exactly the same first 6 colors in the color table). It also didn’t seem worthwhile to interpolate them to take up all 256 indices, now they just use the actual needed indices.
April 23rd, 2008 at 2:57 pm
By plotting R,G and B vectors, I found that the diverging tables are centered on 117. First half is index 0-116 and second half is 117-233. They basically saturate after index 233.
So I just load the 256 colors and use only the first 233 colors.
May 22nd, 2008 at 4:05 pm
[...] made some fixes to the Brewer color tables addressing the issues reported in the comments of the last update by Philippe Le Sage. The update includes the [...]