how do I adjust the z scale on a contourf plot?

I am plotting my data with contourf. The max value is 35 and the minimum value is -24. I am not interesting in visualizing any data beyond +/-5. How can adjust the scale such that the color map is applied only to the range between -5 and +5?

[Angus]

You dont want just caxis([-5 5]) do you? It will limit the colorscale, but will still display the rest of the data outside that.

Answer 1

[Angus]

Probably not the best way but this works somewhat ...

val_range = double(data>=-5 & data<=5);
val_range(val_range==0) = NaN;
[C,h] = contourf(data.*val_range);

Answer 2

[Kilian]

Thanks, Angus, for your quick reply. Actually, caxis works fine. I tried your code with val_range, but that didn't work. I get the message: "Warning: Contour not rendered for non-finite ZData"

With caxis I didn't see it limit the color scale. I wish I could upload a screen shot for illustration. Thanks again for your help.

[Angus]

Too bad about the code not working, not sure why exactly, I was trying to replace any values outside of -5/5 with NaNs, it seemed to work for me but it could fail under some circumstances, apparently :/

Well if caxis got things going for you then great, glad that worked.

Cheers