False color images

I have a program that displays monochrome camera images, obtained as
Numpy arrays of 16-bit integer pixel brightnesses. I'd like to have a
false-color mode that displays low values as blue and high values as
red, to get some extra contrast and make it easier to tell where the
brightest pixels in the image are. I did some searching around and
about all I can find is some discussion on using color-index mode,
with concern that it's really meant for palettized sprites and isn't
really recommended these days. Is that accurate?

Presumably this task has been done before; what's the recommended way
to do false color? Especially, I want to be able to rescale what value
is considered the darkest and what the brightest on the fly -- for
example, if I get an image where the distance between darkest and
brightest pixel is only 1000 (~10 bits) then I don't want to be
scaling things as if the brightest pixel is 2^16-1 and the darkest is
0.

Any advice would be recommended. Thanks.

-Chris

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