matplotlib.colors

The Color tutorials and examples demonstrate how to set colors and colormaps.

A module for converting numbers or color arguments to RGB or RGBA.

RGB and RGBA are sequences of, respectively, 3 or 4 floats in the range 0-1.

This module includes functions and classes for color specification conversions, and for mapping numbers to colors in a 1-D array of colors called a colormap.

Mapping data onto colors using a colormap typically involves two steps: a data array is first mapped onto the range 0-1 using a subclass of Normalize, then this number is mapped to a color using a subclass of Colormap. Two are provided here: LinearSegmentedColormap, which uses piecewise-linear interpolation to define colormaps, and ListedColormap, which makes a colormap from a list of colors.

The module also provides functions for checking whether an object can be interpreted as a color (is_color_like()), for converting such an object to an RGBA tuple (to_rgba()) or to an HTML-like hex string in the #rrggbb format (to_hex()), and a sequence of colors to an (n, 4) RGBA array (to_rgba_array()). Caching is used for efficiency.

Matplotlib recognizes the following formats to specify a color:

• an RGB or RGBA (red, green, blue, alpha) tuple of float values in closed interval [0, 1] (e.g., (0.1, 0.2, 0.5) or (0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 0.3));
• a hex RGB or RGBA string (e.g., '#0f0f0f' or '#0f0f0f80'; case-insensitive);
• a shorthand hex RGB or RGBA string, equivalent to the hex RGB or RGBA string obtained by duplicating each character, (e.g., '#abc', equivalent to '#aabbcc', or '#abcd', equivalent to '#aabbccdd'; case-insensitive);
• a string representation of a float value in [0, 1] inclusive for gray level (e.g., '0.5');
• one of {'b', 'g', 'r', 'c', 'm', 'y', 'k', 'w'}, they are the single character short-hand notations for blue, green, red, cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and white.
• a X11/CSS4 color name (case-insensitive);
• a name from the xkcd color survey, prefixed with 'xkcd:' (e.g., 'xkcd:sky blue'; case insensitive);
• one of the Tableau Colors from the 'T10' categorical palette (the default color cycle): {'tab:blue', 'tab:orange', 'tab:green', 'tab:red', 'tab:purple', 'tab:brown', 'tab:pink', 'tab:gray', 'tab:olive', 'tab:cyan'} (case-insensitive);
• a "CN" color spec, i.e. 'C' followed by a number, which is an index into the default property cycle (matplotlib.rcParams['axes.prop_cycle']); the indexing is intended to occur at rendering time, and defaults to black if the cycle does not include color.

Classes

Functions