How to Open and Use Colormap Editor in MATLAB

A colormap in MATLAB is like a matrix of numbers that determines the colors for different graphical objects such as surfaces, images, and patches. It is a way of assigning colors to represent specific data values, thus defining the visual appearance of these objects. To accomplish this, MATLAB provides a useful tool called the colormap editor that allows us to modify and customize the colormap for our plots interactively.

When you open the colormap editor, you will see a horizontal line composed of rectangular cells, representing the colormap for the current figure. Each cell corresponds to a specific color in the colormap. By adjusting the settings in the colormap editor, you can change the colors, their intensity, add or remove colors, and even create your own custom colormaps.

The purpose of this article is to guide you through the process of opening and effectively using the colormap editor in MATLAB.

How to Open Colormap Editor in MATLAB?

The colormap editor in MATLAB changes the colormap of the selected object or axes. We can use the colormap editor for:

Selecting a predefined colormap.
Saving a colormap and importing it from the workspace.
Adjusting the location of colors in a colormap.
Changing color at a particular position.
Saving the unique colormap to the workspace.

There are two methods to open the colormap editor in MATLAB:

Using the Command Window
Using MATLAB Menu

1: Open Colormap Editor in MATLAB from the Command Window

You can open colormap editor directly from the Command Window of MATLAB by executing following command.

colormapeditor

2: Open Colormap Editor from the MATLAB Menu

You can also open the colormap editor in MATLAB from the menu option. For this purpose, click on the TOOLS option. Then click on the “Colormap Editor” option to open the colormap editor in MATLAB.

TOOLS>Colormap Editor

How to Use Colormap Editor in MATLAB

In this section, we are going to discuss an example to demonstrate the usage of colormap editor in MATLAB.

Example
This example teaches us step-by-step how to use the colormap editor in MATLAB.

Step 1: Make sure you have the figure opened on your MATLAB. This figure can be generated from your MATLAB code.

The following is a sample figure we have generated in MATLAB.

Step 2: Open Colormap Editor and there you can change colormap according to your choice.

Step 3: By clicking and dragging the designated area to the right or left, you can change the colormap of your figure.

Step 4: In order to save the new colormap to the workspace, choose File > Save as or press Ctrl+S once the changes are done.

Note: There are other additional options you can explore, but it depends on your choice because the colormap editor has a lot of options to work with colormap in MATLAB.

Conclusion

The colormap editor in MATLAB is a powerful tool used to change the colormap of the selected object or axes. There’re two methods to open the colormap editor in MATLAB. One is by using the colormapeditor command in the Command Window, and the other is from the Tools option once you double-click on the figure. This guide implemented these ways to open the colormap editor in MATLAB and explored the usage of the colormap editor by using an example.