Contour - washed out values

Hello,

I have values ranging from 1-1800. There are a lot of 1-10 values and very few 1800 values. When I use the contour command, it interpolates every 200 unites (200, 400, 600, etc.), thus washing out my low end numbers. I want more contour lines to show up around the 1-10 values and less around 1800. I’ve been looking through contour properties and found a few of interest – LevelStep and LevelList. From my understanding, I should be able to create an array of values to use with LevelStep, which will be used as the interpolation. However, this has not been working for me.

I was wondering how I can get more contour lines to show up around the 1-10 values and less around 1800. Is LevelStep and LevelList the right direction?

Thanks in advance! Matt

Answer 1

[Abby Skofield]

Hi Matthew - hope you have already figured this out. LevelList is indeed where you want to go. You may also want to set the CLim. Here's an example:

% create some fake data (between 0 and 1) with outliers at 1800
x = abs(peaks);
x(5:6,5:6) = 1800;
x(15:17,15:17) = 1800;

levels = [0:.1:1 800 1700]; % manually specify where to draw contours
contour(x,'LevelList',levels); 
set(gca, 'CLim',[0 1.2]); % set CLim to be the range of most of your data