9.

Map Color and Other Channels

Prof. Pattabiraman.V
SCSE, VIT, Chennai
www.learnersdesk.weebly.com
Introduction
 Color
The color is best understood in terms of three separate
channels: luminance, hue, and saturation.
The major design choice for colormap construction is
whether the intent is to distinguish between categorical
attributes or to encode ordered attributes.
Sequential ordered colormaps show a progression of an
attribute from a minimum to a maximum value, while
diverging ordered colormaps have a visual indication of
a zero point in the center where the attribute values
diverge to negative on one side and positive on the
other.
Introduction
 Color
Bivariate colormaps are designed to show two attributes
simultaneously using carefully designed combinations of
luminance, hue, and saturation.

The characteristics of several more channels are also

covered: the magnitude channels of size, angle, and
curvature and the identity channels of shape and
motion.
Color Vision
• The retina of the eye has 2 different kinds of receptors.
• The rods actively contribute to vision only in low-light.
• The main sensors in normal lighting conditions are the
cones.
• There are 3 types of cones, each with peak sensitivities
at a different wavelength within the spectrum of visible
light.
• The visual system immediately processes these signals
into three opponent color channels: one from red to
green, one from blue to yellow, and one from black and
white encoding luminance information.
Color Spaces
 The color space of what colors the human visual
system can detect is three dimensional; that is, it can be
adequately described using three separate axes.
 There are many ways to mathematically describe color
as a space and to transform colors from one such
space into another.
 Some of these are extremely convenient for computer
manipulation, while others are a better match with the
characteristics of human vision.
RGB System

• The most common color space in computer graphics is

the system where colors are specified as triples of red,
green, and blue values.
• Although this system is computationally convenient, it is
a very poor match for the mechanics of how we see.
• The red, green, and blue axes of the RGB color space
are not useful as separable channels; they give rise to
the integral perception of a color.
HSL System

• The hue–saturation–lightness or HSL system is more

intuitive and is heavily used by artists and designers.
• The hue axis captures what we normally think of as
pure colors that are not mixed with white or black: red,
blue, green, yellow, purple, and so on.
• The saturation axis is the amount of white mixed with
that pure color. For instance, pink is a partially
desaturated red.
• The lightness axis is the amount of black mixed with a
color.
Luminance, Saturation and Hue

• Color can be confusing in visual analysis because it is

sometimes used as a magnitude channel and
sometimes as an identity channel.
• Luminance and saturation are magnitude channels,
while hue is a identity channel.
Transparency
• A fourth channel strongly related to the other three
color channels is transparency: information can be
encoded by decreasing the opacity of a mark from fully
opaque to completely see-through.
• Transparency cannot be used independently of the
other color channels because of its strong interaction
effects with them.
• Transparency is used most often with superimposed
layers, to create a foreground layer that is
distinguishable from the background layer.
• It is frequently used redundantly, where the same
information is encoded with another channel as well.
Colormaps

• A colormap specifies a mapping between colors and

data values; that is, a visual encoding with color. Using
color to encode data is a powerful and flexible design
choice, but colormap design has many pitfalls for the
unwary.
• Colormaps can be categorical or ordered, and
ordered colormaps can be either sequential or
diverging.
Categorical colormap
• A categorical colormap uses color to encode
categories and groupings.
• Categorical colormaps are normally segmented. They
are are also known as qualitative colormaps.
• Very effective when used appropriately; for categorical
data, they are the next best channel after spatial
position.
• Categorical colormaps are typically designed by using
color as an integral identity channel to encode a single
attribute, rather than to encode three completely
separate attributes with the three channels of hue,
saturation, and luminance.
Categorical colormap
• The number of discriminable colors for coding small
separated regions is limited to between six and twelve
bins.
• You should remember to include background color and
any default object colors in your total count: some or all
of the most basic choices of black, white, and gray are
often devoted to those uses.
• Easily nameable colors are desirable, both for
memorability and ability to discuss them using words.
• A good resource for creating colormaps is ColorBrewer
at http://www.colorbrewer2.org
Ordered Colormaps
• An ordered colormap is appropriate for encoding
ordinal or quantitative attributes.
• A sequential colormap ranges from a minimum value
to a maximum value.
• A diverging colormap has two hues at the endpoints
and a neutral color as a midpoint, such as white, gray,
or black, or a high-luminance color such as yellow.
Other Channels
Size Channels
• Size is a magnitude channel suitable for ordered data.
• Length is one-dimensional (1D) size; more specifically,
height is vertical size and width is horizontal size. Area
is two-dimensional (2D) size, and volume is three-
dimensional (3D) size.
• Our judgements of length are extremely accurate.
• Our judgement of area is significantly less accurate.
• The volume channel is quite inaccurate.
Other Channels
Angle Channels
• The angle channel encodes magnitude information
based on the orientation of a mark: the direction that it
points.
• There are two slightly different ways to consider
orientation that are essentially the same channel. With
angle, the orientation of one line is judged with respect
to another line. With tilt, an orientation is judged against
the global frame of the display.
• This channel is somewhat less accurate than length and
position, it is more accurate than area.
Other Channels
Curvature Channel
• The curvature channel is not very accurate, and it can
only be used with line marks.
• It cannot be used with point marks that have no length,
or area marks because their shape is fully constrained.
• The number of distinguishable bins for this channel is
low, probably around two or three; it is in an
equivalence class with volume (3D size) at the bottom
of the magnitude channel ranking.
Other Channels
Shape Channels
• Shape as a identity channel that can be used with point
and line marks.
• Applying the shape channel to line marks results in
stipple patterns such as dotted and dashed lines.
Motion Channels
• Several kinds of motion are also visual channels,
including direction of motion, velocity of motion, and
flicker frequency.
• Motion is less studied than other channels.
Thank You