19/04/2024 Specifying colors — Matplotlib 3.8.

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 › Using Matplotlib › Colors › Specifying colors

Specifying colors

Color formats
Matplotlib recognizes the following formats to specify a color.

Format Example

RGB or RGBA (red, green, blue, alpha) tuple of float values in a (0.1, 0.2, 0.5)
closed interval [0, 1]. (0.1, 0.2, 0.5, 0.3)

Case-insensitive hex RGB or RGBA string. '#0f0f0f'

'#0f0f0f80'

Case-insensitive RGB or RGBA string equivalent hex shorthand '#abc' as '#aabbcc'

of duplicated characters. '#fb1' as '#ffbb11'

String representation of float value in closed interval [0, 1] for '0' as black
grayscale values. '1' as white

'0.8' as light gray

Single character shorthand notation for some basic colors. 'b' as blue

'g' as green
 Note 'r' as red

'c' as cyan
The colors green, cyan, magenta, and yellow do not
coincide with X11/CSS4 colors. Their particular shades 'm' as magenta

were chosen for better visibility of colored lines 'y' as yellow

against typical backgrounds. 'k' as black

'w' as white

Case-insensitive X11/CSS4 color name with no spaces. 'aquamarine'

'mediumseagreen'

Case-insensitive color name from xkcd color survey with 'xkcd:sky blue'
'xkcd:' prefix. 'xkcd:eggshell'

Case-insensitive Tableau Colors from 'T10' categorical palette. 'tab:blue'

'tab:orange'

 Note 'tab:green'

'tab:red'
This is the default color cycle.
'tab:purple'

'tab:brown'

'tab:pink'

'tab:gray'

'tab:olive'

'tab:cyan'
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"CN" color spec where 'C' precedes a number acting as an 'C0'

Format Example
index into the default property cycle. 'C1'

 Note rcParams["axes.prop_cycle"] (default: cycler('color',

['#1f77b4', '#ff7f0e', '#2ca02c', '#d62728', '#9467bd',
Matplotlib indexes color at draw time and defaults to
'#8c564b', '#e377c2', '#7f7f7f', '#bcbd22',
black if cycle does not include color.
'#17becf']) )

Tuple of one of the above color formats and an alpha float. ('green', 0.3)

('#f00', 0.9)

 New in version 3.8.

 See also

The following links provide more information on colors in Matplotlib.

Color Demo Example
matplotlib.colors API
List of named colors Example

"Red", "Green", and "Blue" are the intensities of those colors. In combination, they represent the colorspace.

Transparency
The alpha value of a color specifies its transparency, where 0 is fully transparent and 1 is fully opaque. When a color is semi-
transparent, the background color will show through.

The alpha value determines the resulting color by blending the foreground color with the background color according to the
formula

RGBresult = RGBbackground ∗ (1 − α) + RGBf oreground ∗ α

The following plot illustrates the effect of transparency.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

import numpy as np

from matplotlib.patches import Rectangle

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6.5, 1.65), layout='constrained')

ax.add_patch(Rectangle((-0.2, -0.35), 11.2, 0.7, color='C1', alpha=0.8))
for i, alpha in enumerate(np.linspace(0, 1, 11)):
ax.add_patch(Rectangle((i, 0.05), 0.8, 0.6, alpha=alpha, zorder=0))
ax.text(i+0.4, 0.85, f"{alpha:.1f}", ha='center')
ax.add_patch(Rectangle((i, -0.05), 0.8, -0.6, alpha=alpha, zorder=2))
ax.set_xlim(-0.2, 13)
ax.set_ylim(-1, 1)
ax.set_title('alpha values')
ax.text(11.3, 0.6, 'zorder=1', va='center', color='C0')
ax.text(11.3, 0, 'zorder=2\nalpha=0.8', va='center', color='C1')
ax.text(11.3, -0.6, 'zorder=3', va='center', color='C0')
ax.axis('off')

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The orange rectangle is semi-transparent with alpha = 0.8. The top row of blue squares is drawn below and the bottom row of
blue squares is drawn on top of the orange rectangle.

See also Zorder Demo to learn more on the drawing order.

"CN" color selection

Matplotlib converts "CN" colors to RGBA when drawing Artists. The Styling with cycler section contains additional information
about controlling colors and style properties.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

import numpy as np

import matplotlib as mpl

th = np.linspace(0, 2*np.pi, 128)

def demo(sty):
mpl.style.use(sty)
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(3, 3))

ax.set_title(f'style: {sty!r}', color='C0')

ax.plot(th, np.cos(th), 'C1', label='C1')

ax.plot(th, np.sin(th), 'C2', label='C2')
ax.legend()

demo('default')
demo('seaborn-v0_8')
 

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The first color 'C0' is the title. Each plot uses the second and third colors of each style's rcParams["axes.prop_cycle"] (default:
cycler('color', ['#1f77b4', '#ff7f0e', '#2ca02c', '#d62728', '#9467bd', '#8c564b', '#e377c2', '#7f7f7f', '#bcbd22',

'#17becf']) ). They are 'C1' and 'C2' , respectively.

Comparison between X11/CSS4 and xkcd colors

The xkcd colors come from a user survey conducted by the webcomic xkcd.

95 out of the 148 X11/CSS4 color names also appear in the xkcd color survey. Almost all of them map to different color values in
the X11/CSS4 and in the xkcd palette. Only 'black', 'white' and 'cyan' are identical.

For example, 'blue' maps to '#0000FF' whereas 'xkcd:blue' maps to '#0343DF' . Due to these name collisions, all xkcd
colors have the 'xkcd:' prefix.

The visual below shows name collisions. Color names where color values agree are in bold.

import matplotlib.colors as mcolors

import matplotlib.patches as mpatch

overlap = {name for name in mcolors.CSS4_COLORS

if f'xkcd:{name}' in mcolors.XKCD_COLORS}

fig = plt.figure(figsize=[9, 5])

ax = fig.add_axes([0, 0, 1, 1])

n_groups = 3
n_rows = len(overlap) // n_groups + 1

for j, color_name in enumerate(sorted(overlap)):

css4 = mcolors.CSS4_COLORS[color_name]
xkcd = mcolors.XKCD_COLORS[f'xkcd:{color_name}'].upper()

# Pick text colour based on perceived luminance.

rgba = mcolors.to_rgba_array([css4, xkcd])
luma = 0.299 * rgba[:, 0] + 0.587 * rgba[:, 1] + 0.114 * rgba[:, 2]
css4_text_color = 'k' if luma[0] > 0.5 else 'w'
xkcd_text_color = 'k' if luma[1] > 0.5 else 'w'

col_shift = (j // n_rows) * 3
y_pos = j % n_rows
text_args = dict(fontsize=10, weight='bold' if css4 == xkcd else None)
ax.add_patch(mpatch.Rectangle((0 + col_shift, y_pos), 1, 1, color=css4))
ax.add_patch(mpatch.Rectangle((1 + col_shift, y_pos), 1, 1, color=xkcd))
ax.text(0.5 + col_shift, y_pos + .7, css4,
color=css4_text_color, ha='center', **text_args)
ax.text(1.5 + col_shift, y_pos + .7, xkcd,
color=xkcd_text_color, ha='center', **text_args)
ax.text(2 + col_shift, y_pos + .7, f' {color_name}', **text_args)

for g in range(n_groups):
ax.hlines(range(n_rows), 3*g, 3*g + 2.8, color='0.7', linewidth=1)
ax.text(0.5 + 3*g, -0.3, 'X11/CSS4', ha='center')
ax.text(1.5 + 3*g, -0.3, 'xkcd', ha='center')

ax.set_xlim(0, 3 * n_groups)
ax.set_ylim(n_rows, -1)
ax.axis('off')

plt.show()

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Total running time of the script: (0 minutes 1.584 seconds)

 Download Jupyter notebook: colors.ipynb

 Download Python source code: colors.py

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