A New Default Colormap for ParaView

Abstract

ParaView is one of the most prominent software tools for scientific visualization used by scientists around the world. Color is a primary conduit to visually map data to its representation and, thus, enable investigation and interpretation of the data. Colormap selection has a significant impact on the data revealed; its design and selection is a critical aspect of scientific data visualization. A common choice for a user is the program's default colormap, so careful consideration of this default is consequential. Although the current default colormap in ParaView, a succession of hues from cool blue to warm red, has served the community well, research shows that more nuanced colormap configurations increase discriminability while maintaining other critical metrics. These findings inspire us to revisit and update the default colors in ParaView. Here we present a new ParaView default colormap, the criteria and methods of development, and example visualizations and analytic metrics.