smoothing the shading of pcolor plots

I'm preparing some plots for a presentation and no matter which options I combine, my pcolor plot is always really jagged and not smooth. I'm using interp shading but to no avail. IS there a way to make it as smooth as pcolormesh in python for example??

[DGM]

What is the size of the z data? What does the z data look like? What is the length of the current axes colormap?

[Andres]

An example would be helpful here. I was curious how it would compare to https://matplotlib.org/stable/gallery/images_contours_and_fields/pcolormesh_levels.html

[x,y] = ndgrid(1:0.05:5);
z = sin(x).^10 + cos(10 + y.*x) .* cos(x);
figure
s = pcolor(x,y,z);
s.EdgeColor = 'none';
s.FaceColor = 'interp';
colorbar

I think the plot looks very smooth.

Answer 1

[Manas]

Hi,

You can provide the interpolation method in the interp function, for example, cubic

vq = interp1(x,v,xq,'cubic');

You can also use the imagesc function to interpolate the values as follows:

% Create a sample grid and corresponding values
[X, Y] = meshgrid(linspace(-1, 1, 100));
Z = sin(2*pi*X).*cos(2*pi*Y); % Example values, modify as needed

% Plot the smoothed color plot using imagesc
figure;
imagesc(X(1,:), Y(:,1), Z);
colorbar;
axis equal tight;
title('Smoothed Color Plot');

For more info, you can refer to these documentation:

1-D data interpolation (table lookup) - MATLAB interp1 - MathWorks India

Display image with scaled colors - MATLAB imagesc - MathWorks India