CubeHelix Colormap Generator: Beautiful and Versatile!

The most versatile colormap generator ever! Generate colormaps suitable for grayscale conversion.

This is the only colormap generator you need: CubeHelix are the best colormaps for published or distributed documents!

CUBEHELIX allows you to create different colormaps using just a few parameters. The standard CubeHelix algorithm offer very attractive colorschemes for online and electronic documents (e.g. PDF), and yet when printed in grayscale they keep exactly the sequence information of the original data. CUBEHELIX also includes two extra controls over the range and domain of the CubeHelix scheme, giving a practically unlimited number of colormaps with many different styles: maximally distinct, multi or single hue, or even simple grayscale.

### Bonus Functions ###

* CUBEHELIX_FIND can be used to retrieve the parameters from an existing CubeHelix colormap, or to find the best CubeHelix colorscheme that matches any selection of colors (e.g. a document or corporate colorscheme).
* CUBEHELIX_VIEW creates a figure for creating CubeHelix colorschemes with real-time interactive adjustment of the scheme's parameter values, plus a 'random' demonstration mode. It also allows adjustment of other axes' or figures' colormaps, for example:
load spine
image(X)
cubehelix_view({gca})

### CubeHelix ###

CubeHelix colorschemes consist of nodes along a tapered helix in the RGB color cube, with a continuous increase in perceived intensity (e.g. black->white). Thus the scheme defines attractive colormaps with a huge choice of hue, saturation and brightness, and yet printing a figure (or image) in Black-and-White (e.g. postscript) results in a monotonically increasing grayscale that retains the brightness order of the original colormap. The sequence information of the colormap is retained even in grayscale, which means an attractive colored image can be printed in grayscale and still be informative to the end-user.

The scheme is defined here: http://astron-soc.in/bulletin/11June/289392011.pdf
For more information and examples: http://www.mrao.cam.ac.uk/~dag/CUBEHELIX/

Note: The original specification (the links above) misnamed the saturation option as "hue". In this submission the saturation option is named "sat".

### Examples ###

% New colors for the COLORMAP example:
load spine
image(X)
colormap(cubehelix)

% New colors for the SURF example:
[X,Y,Z] = peaks(30);
surfc(X,Y,Z)
colormap(cubehelix([],0.7,-0.7,2,1,[0.1,0.9],[0.1,0.9]))
axis([-3,3,-3,3,-10,5])

### Examples of Viewing CubeHelix Colormaps ###

% Interactive colorscheme parameter viewer:
cubehelix_view
% Set/reset the viewer with new parameter values:
cubehelix_view([],0.5,-1.5,1,1)

### Examples of Retrieving CubeHelix Colormap Parameters ###

cubehelix_find(cubehelix(10))
ans = [0.5,-1.5,1,1]

map = cubehelix(10, 1.4,-0.7,0.9,1.2, [0.05,0.97]);
[vec,irg,dmn] = cubehelix_find(map)
vec = [1.4,-0.7,0.9,1.2]
irg = [0.05,0.97]
dmn = [0,1]

map = cubehelix(64, [2.3,0.4,0.5,0.6], [0.05,0.24], [0.19,0.85]);
[vec,irg,dmn] = cubehelix_find(map)
vec = [2.3,0.4,0.5,0.6]
irg = [0.05,0.24]
dmn = [0.19,0.85]