# Confused by Color Terms

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/confused-by-color-terms/75063>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Tags:** colors, makie\
**Created:** [January 23, 2022, 12:43pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/confused-by-color-terms/75063 "2022-01-23T12:43:14Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![aachener](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/aachener/32/18112_2.png) [@aachener](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/aachener)\
**Post date:** [January 23, 2022, 12:43pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/confused-by-color-terms/75063/1 "2022-01-23T12:43:15Z")

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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!

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**Author:** ![jules](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/41988e/32.png) [@jules](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/jules)\
**Post date:** [January 23, 2022, 1:03pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/confused-by-color-terms/75063/2 "2022-01-23T13:03:56Z")

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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](https://makie.juliaplots.org/stable/documentation/colors/#colormaps)

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.