DensityPlot command in mathematica

Question

The info for DensityPlot says that the "default generates colorized grayscale output, in which larger values are shown lighter." What on earth is colorized grayscale? Is there a way to make it truly grayscale without the blue and purple colors that it generates? And when I do it, it appears a little pixellated. Is there a way to evaluate it at more points so that it doesnt look so choppy?

Answer 1

By colorized grayscale, I think they mean that it's monochrome, or maybe bichromatic - that is, there's a linear scale from one color to another, rather than fully varying across the whole color space. It's not a very good term, I agree.

Specifying ColorFunction->GrayLevel should give you pure grayscale. This is distinct from the built-in gradient GrayTones (ColorFunction->"GrayTones"), which appears to stop a bit short of pure black and white on the ends and is a bit warm. There are plenty of other built-in gradients - see the return value of ColorData["Gradients"]. You can also specify your own function, of course - it will take as input a real number from 0 to 1, and should return a color specification, e.g. the return values of GrayLevel, RGBColor, Hue, or CMYKColor.

To make it less choppy, as with basically all plotting functions, try specifying a higher value for PlotPoints (the number of initial sampling points) or MaxRecursion (how many times it can resample).