Design of false color palettes for grayscale reproduction

TL;DR

This paper discusses the design of false color palettes that maintain data interpretability when reproduced in grayscale, addressing challenges in scientific visualization and e-ink displays.

Contribution

It introduces methods for designing false color palettes with monotonic luminance to ensure accurate grayscale reproduction, enhancing data clarity.

Findings

Palettes with monotonic luminance preserve data integrity in grayscale.

Design guidelines improve the interpretability of false color visualizations in monochrome.

Examples demonstrate effective palette design for scientific and e-ink applications.

Abstract

Design of false color palette is quite easy but some effort has to be done to achieve good dynamic range, contrast and overall appearance of the palette. Such palettes, for instance, are commonly used in scientific papers for presenting the data. However, to lower the cost of the paper most scientists decide to let the data to be printed in grayscale. The same applies to e-book readers based on e-ink where most of them are still grayscale. For majority of false color palettes reproducing them in grayscale results in ambiguous mapping of the colors and may be misleading for the reader. In this article design of false color palettes suitable for grayscale reproduction is described. Due to the monotonic change of luminance of these palettes grayscale representation is very similar to the data directly presented with a grayscale palette. Some suggestions and examples how to design such palettes are provided.