What is a “good” palette for divergent colors in R? (or: can viridis and magma be combined together?)

Question

I am interested in having a \"good\" divergent color pallette. One could obviously use just red, white, and blue:

img <- function(obj, nam) {
  image(1:le         


        

Answer 1

The scico package (Palettes for R based on the Scientific Colour-Maps ) has several good diverging palettes that are perceptually uniform and colorblind safe (e.g., vik, roma, berlin).

Also available for Python, MatLab, GMT, QGIS, Plotly, Paraview, VisIt, Mathematica, Surfer, d3, etc. here

Paper: Crameri, F. (2018), Geodynamic diagnostics, scientific visualisation and StagLab 3.0, Geosci. Model Dev., 11, 2541-2562, doi:10.5194/gmd-11-2541-2018

Blog: The Rainbow Colour Map (repeatedly) considered harmful

# install.packages('scico')
# or
# install.packages("devtools")
# devtools::install_github("thomasp85/scico")
library(scico)
scico_palette_show(palettes = c("broc", "cork", "vik",
                                "lisbon", "tofino", "berlin",
                                "batlow", "roma"))

Another great package is cmocean. Its colormaps are available in R via the pals package or the oce package.

Paper: Thyng, K. M., Greene, C. A., Hetland, R. D., Zimmerle, H. M., & DiMarco, S. F. (2016). True colors of oceanography. Oceanography, 29(3), 10, http://dx.doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2016.66.

Talk: PLOTCON 2016: Kristen Thyng, Custom Colormaps for Your Field.

### install.packages("devtools")    
### devtools::install_github("kwstat/pals")   
library(pals)   
pal.bands(ocean.balance, ocean.delta, ocean.curl, main = "cmocean")   

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Edit: add seven levels max colorblind-friendly palettes from the rcartocolor package

library(rcartocolor)
display_carto_all(type = 'diverging', colorblind_friendly = TRUE)