I'd just use colormap and not mess with contours unless you know what you're doing and what you want. To pseudocolor a grayscale image an leave it as grayscale but display it as colored:
imshow(grayImage);
colormap(jet(256));
colorbar;
To convert a grayscale image into a true color RGB image and display the RGB image instead of the pseudocolored image:
rgbImage = ind2rgb(grayImage, jet(256));
imshow(rgbImage);
You don't use color bars with RGB images.
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