Colormap appears darker on another plot, how to change that ?

I am plotting states of a solution at different times, and to visualise the solution I added a colormap that depends on the x position. I also superposed a sphere to help visualise the 3D plot. I should note that in order to color the plots, I used the patch function. Unfortunately, the 3D plot appears much darker than the energy plot (see the figures). I put two figures to show that the colormap still had some influence on the 3D plot the parameters for the plot of the sphere are :

'FaceColor' = [0.99, 0.99, 0.99];
alpha  0.07;

The two figures (at no point I can see colors as bright as at x=0 on the 3D-plot) :

Thank you for your time !

Answer 1

[LO]

you could change the colormap of your plot/s by adding (or subtracting) fixed values according to your needs

k = 0.01; % factor by which you want to increase color value
cmap = colormap; % actual colormap
size_cm=size(cmap); % get the size of the map
new_map = cmap + repelem(k,size_cm(1),size_cm(2)); % calculate the new colormap
new_map(new_map>1)=1; % make sure values do not exceed the max of 1
colormap(<subplot_handle>,new_map) % apply new map

here is my test code

clc
k = 0.02; % darker color, if you put 0 you have the default, negative values will darken the map

cmap = colormap;
size_cm=size(cmap);
new_map = cmap + repelem(k,size_cm(1),size_cm(2))
new_map(new_map>1)=1; % this makes sure there is no value higher than 1
new_map(new_map<0)=0; % this makes sure there is no value lower  than 0

ax1=subplot(2,1,1)
surf(randi(50,50),'edgecolor','none')
colormap(ax1,new_map)
view(2)
ylim([0 50])
axis tight equal

k = 0.7; % brighter color, if you put 1 you have the max

cmap = colormap;
size_cm=size(cmap);
new_map = cmap + repelem(k,size_cm(1),size_cm(2))
new_map(new_map>1)=1; % this makes sure there is no value higher than 1
new_map(new_map<0)=0; % this makes sure there is no value lower  than 0

ax2=subplot(2,1,2)
surf(randi(50,50),'edgecolor','none')
colormap(ax2,new_map)
view(2)
ylim([0 50])
axis tight equal

[Gronaz]

Sorry for the late reply, and thank you for your reply !

For the test case you showed, it works nicely, although I don't get how I could link a colorbar with both colormaps (in some cases I would like to have a colorbar linked to all subplots), and I also have to set k manually so that the colors appear at the same brightness on both plots.

[LO]

sadly that needs to be set manually for each plot but using some work around (if you just used the command colorbar this will change all colorbars in your figure). I do not remember it but somewhere in the MATLAB forum I am sure you'll find it. Maybe see here.

What worked for me sometimes was this (example using scatter plots of different colors):

color2 = flipud(cool(length( array_data1  ) ) );
color1 = hot(length( array_data2 ) );
hold on
scatter(array_data1(:,1),array_data1(:,2),1,'filled','CData', color1)
scatter(array_data2(:,1),array_data2(:,2),1,'filled','CData', color2)

In this example I am using part of 2 colormaps (hot and cool) based on the length of the data arrays to be plotted. One color vector is flipped as I wanted to have the first datapoints to be darker in both cases. The last data points of my 2 arrays are lighter in color. I guess this could work for any plot accepting CData property.