Colormap reference#

Reference for colormaps included with Matplotlib.

A reversed version of each of these colormaps is available by appending _r to the name, as shown in Reversed colormaps.

See Choosing Colormaps in Matplotlib for an in-depth discussion about colormaps, including colorblind-friendliness, and Creating Colormaps in Matplotlib for a guide to creating colormaps.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

cmaps = [('Perceptually Uniform Sequential', [
            'viridis', 'plasma', 'inferno', 'magma', 'cividis']),
         ('Sequential', [
            'Greys', 'Purples', 'Blues', 'Greens', 'Oranges', 'Reds',
            'YlOrBr', 'YlOrRd', 'OrRd', 'PuRd', 'RdPu', 'BuPu',
            'GnBu', 'PuBu', 'YlGnBu', 'PuBuGn', 'BuGn', 'YlGn']),
         ('Sequential (2)', [
            'gray', 'bone', 'pink', 'spring', 'summer', 'autumn', 'winter',
            'cool', 'Wistia', 'hot', 'afmhot', 'gist_heat', 'copper']),
         ('Diverging', [
            'PiYG', 'PRGn', 'BrBG', 'PuOr', 'RdGy', 'RdBu',
            'RdYlBu', 'RdYlGn', 'Spectral', 'coolwarm', 'bwr', 'seismic',
            'berlin', 'managua', 'vanimo']),
         ('Cyclic', ['twilight', 'twilight_shifted', 'hsv']),
         ('Qualitative', [
            'Pastel1', 'Pastel2', 'Paired', 'Accent', 'okabe_ito',
            'Dark2', 'Set1', 'Set2', 'Set3',
            'tab10', 'tab20', 'tab20b', 'tab20c']),
         ('Miscellaneous', [
            'flag', 'prism', 'ocean', 'gist_earth', 'terrain', 'gist_stern',
            'gnuplot', 'gnuplot2', 'CMRmap', 'cubehelix', 'brg',
            'gist_rainbow', 'rainbow', 'jet', 'turbo', 'nipy_spectral',
            'gist_ncar'])]

gradient = np.linspace(0, 1, 256)
gradient = np.vstack((gradient, gradient))


def plot_color_gradients(cmap_category, cmap_list):
    # Create figure and adjust figure height to number of colormaps
    nrows = len(cmap_list)
    figh = 0.35 + 0.15 + (nrows + (nrows-1)*0.1)*0.22
    fig, axs = plt.subplots(nrows=nrows, figsize=(6.4, figh))
    fig.subplots_adjust(top=1-.35/figh, bottom=.15/figh, left=0.2, right=0.99)

    axs[0].set_title(f"{cmap_category} colormaps", fontsize=14)

    for ax, cmap_name in zip(axs, cmap_list):
        ax.imshow(gradient, aspect='auto', cmap=cmap_name)
        ax.text(-.01, .5, cmap_name, va='center', ha='right', fontsize=10,
                transform=ax.transAxes)

    # Turn off *all* ticks & spines, not just the ones with colormaps.
    for ax in axs:
        ax.set_axis_off()


for cmap_category, cmap_list in cmaps:
    plot_color_gradients(cmap_category, cmap_list)

Discouraged

For backward compatibility we additionally support the following colormap names, which are identical to other builtin colormaps. Their use is discouraged. Use the suggested replacement instead.

Colormap	Use identical replacement instead
gist_gray	gray
gist_yarg	gray_r
binary	gray_r

Reversed colormaps#

Append _r to the name of any built-in colormap to get the reversed version:

plot_color_gradients("Original and reversed ", ['viridis', 'viridis_r'])

The built-in reversed colormaps are generated using Colormap.reversed. For an example, see Reversing a colormap

References

The use of the following functions, methods, classes and modules is shown in this example:

Tags: styling: colormap purpose: reference

Total running time of the script: (0 minutes 1.783 seconds)

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