256 Color Ramp Symbology

jcokin1

The ESRI color ramp "Full Bright Spectrum" has a limited number of colors for distribution as standard.

I would hope to see future versions of ArcGIS 10x and above make a color bar ramps that incorporate the full 256 color spectrum as part of the standard ESRI Style File. I have attached screen captures to illustrate the point.







One of the main benefits in having a full 256 color spectrum (histogram equalization) will help illustrate the subtle anomalies or variances within the gridded data.

With more data detail becoming available to the geologist or geographer using the data, a better analysis and QC can be performed.

Even though custom color ramps can be designed by the individual ArcGIS user and Style Files can be imported that possess advanced color ramps, it is this additional step that can be avoided if a full 256 color ramp were made part of the standard ArcGIS product suite.

The screen capture examples utilizes the Geosoft.style File which already contain a full 256 color shaded spectrum.

ESRI could simply adopt their colors as standard for all GIS users at whatever license level (ArcView, ArcEditor, ArcInfo) in the next version.

DeanSitzman

This idea is of interest to the PUG (http://www.pugonline.org/ ) and applies to raster format data.