Tutorial by Examples

Using built-in colormaps is as simple as passing the name of the required colormap (as given in the colormaps reference) to the plotting function (such as pcolormesh or contourf) that expects it, usually in the form of a cmap keyword argument: import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np ...

Apart from the built-in colormaps defined in the colormaps reference (and their reversed maps, with '_r' appended to their name), custom colormaps can also be defined. The key is the matplotlib.cm module. The below example defines a very simple colormap using cm.register_cmap, containing a single c...

The original default colourmap of MATLAB (replaced in version R2014b) called jet is ubiquitous due to its high contrast and familiarity (and was the default of matplotlib for compatibility reasons). Despite its popularity, traditional colormaps often have deficiencies when it comes to representing d...

If you have predefined ranges and want to use specific colors for those ranges you can declare custom colormap. For example: import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np import matplotlib.colors x = np.linspace(-2,2,500) y = np.linspace(-2,2,500) XX, YY = np.meshgrid(x, y) Z = np.sin(...