Confused by Color Terms

Hi, guys,

I am reading Makie documentations but find myself confused with color terms, like Colormap, ColorScheme, palette… Especially what the difference between colormap and colorscheme?

And, how to define my own colomaps to be used in Makie?

If there is any tutorials pleas guide me there, many thanks!

A color scheme is a broad term that describes any sort of collection of colors, here’s a page with a collection of such schemes. Colors

If you discretize an array of colors you can use that to look up either the original colors (categorical) or values in between (continuous). Those color vectors for lookup are called colormaps. But often the term is used also for the broader meaning of color scheme, not just the vector of colors.

A palette is a list of values that you can cycle between to give subsequent plots different looks. You can have one palette for colors, one for marker shapes, one for line styles etc.

At least that’s the distinction that I’d make, but often the words get mixed up.

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