Design of false color palettes for grayscale reproduction
This addresses a practical issue for scientists and readers who rely on grayscale reproductions, but it is incremental as it builds on existing palette design methods.
The paper tackles the problem of false color palettes becoming ambiguous when reproduced in grayscale, such as in printed scientific papers or e-ink readers, by describing a design approach that ensures monotonic luminance changes for clear grayscale representation.
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.