How do I change matlab colorbar scaling

Question

I am having a really hard time understanding how to change the range of my colorbar in Matlab2015b.

By default it will range from 0 to 1. I managed to change the label by using:

    c=colorbar;
    c.Limits=[0 180] % the range that I want

The problem is the colors don't scale when I do that, in other words it will display from 0 to 180 but still uses the colors associated to [0 1], which makes look the the whole bar like one color.

I used another approach by just changing the ticks and doing:

colorbar('Yticks',[0:10:180]).

Again, the colorbar is still associated to 0 to 1, so none of the ticks except 0 will appear as the first one starts at 10.

How do I change the data it is based on ? I tried changing c.UserData but it doesn't do anything.

Answer 1

A way that does not manually override tick specification can be achieved by:

limits = [0,180];
c = colorbar;
set(gca,'clim',limits([1,end]))

From there, the ticks may be manually changed or left alone as desired.

1. Original scale colorbar
2. Rescaled, but retained auto-tick labels

Answer 2

From your comment, I see what you are trying to do.

You are on the right lines setting ytick, but as you noticed this only changes the position of the ticks on your colorbar, but the scaling stays the same. Instead, try to set yticklabel:

% Show the colorbar
c = colorbar;

% Define the desired ticks
ticks = [0:10:180];

% Sets the correct location and number of ticks
set(c, 'ytick', ticks / max(ticks));

% Set the tick labels as desired
set(c, 'yticklabel', ticks);