Selecting individual colors from a colormap

Sometimes we want to use more colors or a different set of colors than the default color cycle provides. Selecting individual colors from one of the provided colormaps can be a convenient way to do this.

We can retrieve colors from any Colormap by calling it with a float or a list of floats in the range [0, 1]; e.g. cmap(0.5) will give the middle color. See also Colormap.__call__.

Extracting colors from a continuous colormap

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

import matplotlib as mpl

n_lines = 21
cmap = mpl.colormaps['plasma']

# Take colors at regular intervals spanning the colormap.
colors = cmap(np.linspace(0, 1, n_lines))

fig, ax = plt.subplots(layout='constrained')

for i, color in enumerate(colors):
    ax.plot([0, i], color=color)

plt.show()

Extracting colors from a discrete colormap

The list of all colors in a ListedColormap is available as the colors attribute.

colors = mpl.colormaps['Dark2'].colors

fig, ax = plt.subplots(layout='constrained')

for i, color in enumerate(colors):
    ax.plot([0, i], color=color)

plt.show()

See Also

For more details about manipulating colormaps, see Creating Colormaps in Matplotlib. To change the default color cycle, see Styling with cycler.

References

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

• matplotlib.colors.Colormap

• matplotlib.colors.Colormap.resampled