Filled Contour Action Example

If you want to see a more meaningful visualization of the data, use or create another action that contains the keywords that display the data the way you want to see it. The following action definition displays the same data in ten contour levels and the contours are filled and color-coded.

Return to the IDL Workbench. Make sure that you are viewing the Visualize Perspective. (Click the Visualize button (

) in the upper right of the Workbench.)

If you do not already have the ELEV variable available in the Variables view, enter the following at the command line (or click on the code below to run it in IDL):

RESTORE, FILEPATH('marbells.dat', SUBDIR=['examples','data'])

The ELEV variable appears in the Variables View.

Click on the action toggle button (

) to expand the Tool Palette to display the actions. (You can also drag the right border of the Tool Palette to the right to display the actions.)

Click on the Contour tool in the Tool Palette to display the available contour actions. Find the Filled Contour: 2D array action. The action definition is based on the IDL ICONTOUR procedure. The following table describes the action definition:


Action Element	Item	Description
IDL Procedure	ICONTOUR	Calls the iContour iTool procedure.
Positional Arguments	Z	Defines the data variables to use.
Keywords	/FILL	Fills the contours.
	N_LEVELS=10	Defines the number of contour levels.
	RGB_TABLE=22	Defines a color table for the procedure.
	INSERT_COLORBAR= [-0.5, -0.9]	Inserts a colorbar at a defined location.
	WINDOW_TITLE= 'Contour %1'	Defines a title for the iTools window using a token for the variable name. See Visualize Perspective Settings for more information.
Title	Filled Contour: 2D array	Title appears in the action by default.
Description	Display a two-dimensional array using a filled contour plot.	Description appears on mouse hover over the action.

Drag the ELEV variable to the Filled Contour action:

Click the ICONTOUR button in the action.

The new contour displays in the iContour window:

Tip
For more information on creating actions, see Creating an Action.

Manipulating Contour Visualizations

Once you have visualized an image, you can perform many different kinds of operations on it, including:

Overplotting another visualization (see Surface and Contour Example and Plot With Overplot Example, and Alternative Methods for Overplotting (Windows Only))

Modifying properties such as adding colorbars, axes, resampling, filtering, contouring, and surfacing (see Contour Properties)

Manipulating the image by rotating, scaling, flipping, inverting, zooming, adding annotations, etc. (see Manipulating the Contour Display)

Changing operations such as scaling, cropping, or viewing statistics or a histogram (see iContour Tool Operations)

Using the iTools Procedural Interface to add a variety of annotations.

For more information, please refer to Working with Images and Manipulating the Display in the iTools User Guide.