Choosing colours for your maps

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A good site to use to get colour guidancefor your maps and graphs is Color Brewer.

The color blind safe options is useful.

http://colorbrewer2.org/

3 Answers

  1. LOL.. if you look at the last link I sent http://www.crisp.nus.edu.sg/~research/tutorial/opt_int.htm smoke appears blue - maybe a ship is on fire!! Blue is the least used color band in remote sensing.

  2. Hi Johnney, I have not had much experience with off shore remote sensing - to state the obvious water is usually black as it absorbs all light with no reflectance. So must be something in the water!! Standard false color is NIR, Red and Green bands as R,G,B A very common false colour composite scheme for displaying a SPOT multispectral image is shown below: R = XS3 (NIR band) G = XS2 (red band) B = XS1 (green band) This false colour composite scheme allows vegetation to be detected readily in the image. In this type of false colour composite images, vegetation appears in different shades of red depending on the types and conditions of the vegetation, since it has a high reflectance in the NIR band (as shown in the graph of spectral reflectance signature). Clear water appears dark-bluish (higher green band reflectance), while turbid water appears cyan (higher red reflectance due to sediments) compared to clear water. Bare soils, roads and buildings may appear in various shades of blue, yellow or grey, depending on their composition. http://www.crisp.nus.edu.sg/~research/tutorial/opt_int.htm I don't think standard false color is used in ocean analysis. Light blue is usually high reflectance , white sand bar or coral - check the link at the top. Compare the image with an aerial photograph or Google earth image might see a structure in the water that you can use as "ground truthing". Let me know how you go - as this is at my limits of experience.

  3. Andrew need your opinion, in standard false color composite of remote sensing image of an ocean, what does light blue color in offshore regions indicate? I was going through some discussion tread about this topic and wanted to gets some more information about it. Can you please help?