Abstract This paper studies on the false color synthetic processing for polarimetric SAR data. A new method to get false color image of polarimetric SAR data with the unitary Stokes matrix is presented. Because this method discards the information of total power, it can be used to analyze the target with more power or less power and the target with the same shape in polarization signatures. The paper also presents the way to find three optimum polarization s combinations to enhance the contrast between two types of scatters with polarization signature and use the polarization synthesis to get false color image of polarimetric SAR data.