By default, Datashader accurately conveys the shape of the distribution in a way that the human visual system can process. If you want a linear representation, you can do that easily; see the first plot in http://datashader.org/topics/census.html , but you'll quickly see that the resulting plot completely fails to show that there are any patterns anywhere besides the top few population hotspots, which is highly unrepresentative of the actual patterns in this data. There is no saturation here; what it's doing in the homepage image is basically a rank-order encoding, where the top brightness value is indeed shared by several high-population pixes, the next brightness value is shared by the next batch of populations, etc. Given only 256 possible values, there has to be some grouping, but it's not saturating.