Replicating how ArcMap assigns colours in colour ramp in QGIS?

Question

I am new to QGIS and want to replicate the way ArcMap displays values using an HSV colour ramp.

ArcMap seems to assign colours repeating the colour ramp many times throughout the entire list of values

Whereas QGIS assigns colours from beginning to end using the entire colour ramp

The result ends up in very different looking maps between the 2 programs.

Any ideas on how to replicate the ArcMap results in QGIS?

I really want to move away from using ArcMap!

Answer 1

I'm not sure your conclusion that Arc repeats the colour map is valid - the first four items and the second four items in your dialog box aren't the same colour sequence. The styling here is "unique values", which means as long as each Blk value has its own colour then there's no guarantee of the ordering. If you want an ordering then don't use "unique values" with categories - use a continuous colour scheme in QGIS and the equivalent (possibly in the "Quantities" option?) in Arc.

Answer 2

If you right-click the Color Ramp bar in your ArcMap layer properties you can get to the colours that it is applying (could be more than two, but you can find out their colour values from this box)

You're using a unique value renderer applied to what looks like many hundreds of unique values. There are only so many colours that can be found between the start and end colour values of your colour ramp, so that would explain why they are being repeated on your map.

Nevertheless, in QGIS, you would apply the same ramp by:

• Open layer properties of your polygon layer
• Under the Style node on the left, choose the Categorized renderer
• select the Colour ramp icon on the right
• scroll down and choose "New Colour Ramp"
• Choose "Gradient"
• In this dialogue you can build the same colour scheme as you had in ArcMap (I used the 'pick colour' option to use a colour picker eye dropper to replicate your colours, and came up with this:)

That's the basics of it, but there are no ways to automatically do this, so it will require some manual work to get at the colours, keep a list, and apply them to a QGIS colour scheme.