The labrigger blog keeps posting links to all kind of colormaps, so I tried out some of them. Being partially colorblind, I do not like the default colormaps e.g. of Matlab. Here are some noisy data, with two different scalings for each colormap.

A: Matlab default until recently (jet). B: The default variant of CubeHelix. C: Colorbrewer ‘diverging’. D: Colorbrewer ‘sequential’ 2. E: Grayscale.

Actually I like none of them. I find data much more accessible if they are presented as 1D plots, unless they are smooth and beautiful. Since I’m partially colorblind, I especially do not like A and C, which have strange parts in the middle part of the colorscale. I never liked the green and turquois part of “jet”. B looks like tree bark to me, to be honest. D and E are both fine for me, but I’d prefer D because of the more beautiful colors.