A comparison of ‘Rainbow’ (perceptually uniform - lightness uniform throughout range) with a few different perceptually linear (lightness increases linearly throughout range) options, for anyone who’s interested:
The perceptually linear options use both colour and lightness to differentiate values, with the lightness drawing more attention to higher intensities. The perceptually uniform (rainbow) option uses colour to differentiate values, and the warmer red/yellow colours draw more attention to higher intensities.
Adding the Ping Viewer defaults options thermal blue and monochrome sepia, black, and white to the bottom:
- Thermal blue has a bright yellow portion in the middle which focuses attention on mid-strength values, so relies on colour warmth to emphasise higher intensities.
- The monochrome options use only lightness for both differentiation and emphasis.
- Sepia has a more limited fidelity than the others because it has a lower total contrast.
- Humans see small lightness changes more easily in dark regions than in light ones, so monochrome white would be most suited to identification/categorisation of an object material/shape/texture rather than finding objects.
- Rainbow has uniform lightness, so is likely also well-suited to identification/categorisation
I should probably clean this up a bit and add the info to our docs.
I’d be interested to know if this is useful to you, and any questions it might raise 
Files
BGYW.txt (415 Bytes)
BMY.txt (415 Bytes)
Fire.txt (415 Bytes)
Rainbow.txt (399 Bytes)