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Customized Colorbars Tutorial — Matplotlib 3.8.4 Documentation

The Customized Colorbars Tutorial for Matplotlib 3.8.4 provides guidance on creating and customizing standalone colorbars without an attached plot. It covers various types of colorbars including basic continuous, discrete with extended colorscale, and those with arbitrary colors, along with examples of how to implement them using Python code. The tutorial emphasizes the use of ScalarMappable objects and different normalization techniques to achieve desired visual effects in color representation.

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4 views

Customized Colorbars Tutorial — Matplotlib 3.8.4 Documentation

The Customized Colorbars Tutorial for Matplotlib 3.8.4 provides guidance on creating and customizing standalone colorbars without an attached plot. It covers various types of colorbars including basic continuous, discrete with extended colorscale, and those with arbitrary colors, along with examples of how to implement them using Python code. The tutorial emphasizes the use of ScalarMappable objects and different normalization techniques to achieve desired visual effects in color representation.

Uploaded by

higissa3
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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19/04/2024 Customized Colorbars Tutorial — Matplotlib 3.8.

4 documentation

 › Using Matplotlib › Colors › Customized Colorbars Tutorial

Customized Colorbars Tutorial


This tutorial shows how to build and customize standalone colorbars, i.e. without an attached plot.

A colorbar needs a "mappable" ( matplotlib.cm.ScalarMappable ) object (typically, an image) which indicates the colormap and
the norm to be used. In order to create a colorbar without an attached image, one can instead use a ScalarMappable with no
associated data.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt


import matplotlib as mpl

Basic continuous colorbar


Here, we create a basic continuous colorbar with ticks and labels.

The arguments to the colorbar call are the ScalarMappable (constructed using the norm and cmap arguments), the axes where
the colorbar should be drawn, and the colorbar's orientation.

For more information see the colorbar API.

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 1), layout='constrained')

cmap = mpl.cm.cool
norm = mpl.colors.Normalize(vmin=5, vmax=10)

fig.colorbar(mpl.cm.ScalarMappable(norm=norm, cmap=cmap),
cax=ax, orientation='horizontal', label='Some Units')

Colorbar attached next to a pre-existing axes


All examples in this tutorial (except this one) show a standalone colorbar on its own figure, but it is possible to display the
colorbar next to a pre-existing Axes ax by passing ax=ax to the colorbar() call (meaning "draw the colorbar next to ax") rather
than cax=ax (meaning "draw the colorbar on ax").

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

fig.colorbar(mpl.cm.ScalarMappable(norm=mpl.colors.Normalize(0, 1), cmap='magma'),


ax=ax, orientation='vertical', label='a colorbar label')

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Discrete and extended colorbar with continuous colorscale


The following example shows how to make a discrete colorbar based on a continuous cmap. We use
matplotlib.colors.BoundaryNorm to describe the interval boundaries (which must be in increasing order), and further pass the
extend argument to it to further display "over" and "under" colors (which are used for data outside of the norm range).

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 1), layout='constrained')

cmap = mpl.cm.viridis
bounds = [-1, 2, 5, 7, 12, 15]
norm = mpl.colors.BoundaryNorm(bounds, cmap.N, extend='both')

fig.colorbar(mpl.cm.ScalarMappable(norm=norm, cmap=cmap),
cax=ax, orientation='horizontal',
label="Discrete intervals with extend='both' keyword")

  

Colorbar with arbitrary colors


The following example still uses a BoundaryNorm to describe discrete interval boundaries, but now uses a
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matplotlib.colors.ListedColormap to associate each interval with an arbitrary color (there must be as many intervals than there
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are colors). The "over" and "under" colors are set on the colormap using Colormap.with_extremes .

We also pass additional arguments to colorbar :

To display the out-of-range values on the colorbar, we use the extend argument in the colorbar() call. (This is equivalent to
passing the extend argument in the BoundaryNorm constructor as done in the previous example.)
To make the length of each colorbar segment proportional to its corresponding interval, we use the spacing argument in the
colorbar() call.

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 1), layout='constrained')

cmap = (mpl.colors.ListedColormap(['red', 'green', 'blue', 'cyan'])


.with_extremes(under='yellow', over='magenta'))
bounds = [1, 2, 4, 7, 8]
norm = mpl.colors.BoundaryNorm(bounds, cmap.N)

fig.colorbar(
mpl.cm.ScalarMappable(cmap=cmap, norm=norm),
cax=ax, orientation='horizontal',
extend='both',
spacing='proportional',
label='Discrete intervals, some other units',
)

Colorbar with custom extension lengths


We can customize the length colorbar extensions, on a colorbar with discrete intervals. To make the length of each extension the
same as the length of the interior colors, use extendfrac='auto' .

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 1), layout='constrained')

cmap = (mpl.colors.ListedColormap(['royalblue', 'cyan', 'yellow', 'orange'])


.with_extremes(over='red', under='blue'))
bounds = [-1.0, -0.5, 0.0, 0.5, 1.0]
norm = mpl.colors.BoundaryNorm(bounds, cmap.N)

fig.colorbar(
mpl.cm.ScalarMappable(cmap=cmap, norm=norm),
cax=ax, orientation='horizontal',
extend='both', extendfrac='auto',
spacing='uniform',
label='Custom extension lengths, some other units',
)

plt.show()

Total running time of the script: (0 minutes 1.050 seconds)

 Download Jupyter notebook: colorbar_only.ipynb


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 Download Python source code: colorbar_only.py

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