Creating selectable palettes with custom colours

[John Horrigan]

Good morning. This is my first post here, so thanks for your patience if I'm covering old ground.

I'm currently using Dplot with imported excel data for an XYZ contour (shaded band) map across a 10,000 datapoint set. This is basically a reconstruction of a sensor image and I'm able to reproduce the image rather close to the original. That said, I think I can get it finer still.

The data ranges require several colour palettes for clarity, depending on the nature of the data. I'd like to be able to construct custom palettes with these colour ranges that I can simply select and apply to future imported dataset. What's the easiest way to do this?

Second, most of the palettes follow a portion of the spectral progression from violet through red, but I'd like to use a deeper or richer colour than the default, partly because the green washes out on some of our displays, affecting resolution in some of the primary areas of interest. In some cases the paletette has the full range of 255 colours. What is the easiest way to build a palette like this. i.e., I really don't want to have to individually select or type in RGB codes.

Thanks for any light you can shed on this.

Cheers
-John

[DPlotAdmin]

John,

I'd like to be able to construct custom palettes with these colour ranges that I can simply select and apply to future imported dataset. What's the easiest way to do this?

On the Contour Options dialog select "Custom" under colors. Once all your colors are defined click the Save As button to save that palette. You can later re-open that file with the Open button on that same dialog. Unfortunately there's no way to automate this with a macro (e.g. press Ctrl+whatever to automatically open a palette). I'll add that to the next release.

Second, most of the palettes follow a portion of the spectral progression from violet through red, but I'd like to use a deeper or richer colour than the default, partly because the green washes out on some of our displays, affecting resolution in some of the primary areas of interest. In some cases the paletette has the full range of 255 colours. What is the easiest way to build a palette like this. i.e., I really don't want to have to individually select or type in RGB codes.

If you want your palette to be a blend between 2 (or 3 or 4 or however many) colors you don't need to enter 255 color definitions; just enter your 2 (or 3 or 4) colors and DPlot will do the interpolation for you.

[John Horrigan]

Thanks David. That should make life a lot simpler!

Cheers
-John