My suggestion would be to create an image, set it as you want, save the colormap and color axis limits to a mat file.
cmap = colormap(gca);
cl = caxis;
save cmap.mat cmap cl
Then, when you want to use the same colormap, load the mat file, and set the colormap and color axis limits to the values loaded in the mat file.
load cmap
contourf(X,Y,z)
colormap(cmap);
colorbar
caxis(cl);
