False color

For operations under false military colors, see False flag.

A mosaic constructed from a series of 53 images taken through three spectral filters by Galileo's imaging system as it flew over the northern regions of the Moon in December 1992.
A false-color image from the Meteor M2-2 satellite's imager MSU-MR. The image was received by an amateur radio station and is derived from the HRPT data.

False colors and pseudo colors respectively refers to a group of color rendering methods used to display images in colors which were recorded in the visible or non-visible parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. A false-color image is an image that depicts an object in colors that differ from those a photograph (a true-color image) would show. In this image, colors have been assigned to three different wavelengths that human eyes cannot normally see.

In addition, variants of false colors such as pseudocolors, density slicing, and choropleths are used for information visualization of either data gathered by a single grayscale channel or data not depicting parts of the electromagnetic spectrum (e.g. elevation in relief maps or tissue types in magnetic resonance imaging).