Color Spectrum Plot

Description

Visualization of color palettes (given as hex codes) in HCL and/or RGB coordinates.

As the hues for low-chroma colors are not (or poorly) identified, by default a smoothing is applied to the hues (fix = TRUE). Also, to avoid jumps from 0 to 360 or vice versa, the hue coordinates are shifted suitably.

If argument x is a maplotlib.colors.LinearSegmentedColormap or matplotlib.colors.ListedColormap, 256 distinct colors across the color map are drawn and visualized.

Usage

specplot(x, y=None, hcl=True, palette=True,
         fix=True, rgb=False, title=None, fig=None,
         **figargs)

Arguments

xlist, LinearSegmentedColormap, ListedColormap
list of str (hex colors or standard-names of colors) or a matplotlib.colors.LinearSegmentedColormap.
yNone, list, LinearSegmentedColormap
if set it must be a list of str (see x) with the very same length as the object provided on argument x or a maplotlib.colors.LinearSegmentedColormap. Allows to draw two sets of colors for comparison, defaults to None.
hclbool
Whether or not to plot the HCL color spectrum.
palettebool
Whether or not to plot the colors as a color map (color swatch).
fixbool
Should the hues be fixed to be on a smooth(er) curve? Details in the functions description.
rgbbool
Whether or not to plot the RGB color spectrum, defaults to False.
titleNone or str
title of the figure. Defaults to None (no title).
figNone, matplotlib.figure.Figure
If None, a new matplotlib.figure.Figure is created.
**figargs
forwarded to matplotlib.pyplot.subplot. Only has an effect if fig = None.

Examples

from colorspace import rainbow_hcl, diverging_hcl
from colorspace import specplot
pal = rainbow_hcl()
specplot(pal.colors(21));

# Show spectrum in standard RGB space
specplot(pal.colors(21), rgb = True);

# Reduced number of colors.
# Show sRGB spectrum, hide HCL spectrum
# and color palette swatch.
specplot(pal.colors(), rgb = True, hcl = False,
         palette = False, figsize = (8, 3));

# Comparing full diverging_hcl() color spectrum to
# a LinearSegmentedColormap (cmap) with only 5 colors
# (an extreme example)
specplot(diverging_hcl("Green-Orange").colors(101),
         diverging_hcl("Green-Orange").cmap(5),
         rgb = True, figsize = (8, 3));

# Same as above using .cmap() default with N = 256 colors
specplot(diverging_hcl("Green-Orange").colors(101),
         diverging_hcl("Green-Orange").cmap(),
         rgb = True, figsize = (8, 3));

Raises

  • ImportError: If matplotlib is not installed.
  • TypeError: If x is not list or matplotlib.colors.LinearSegmentedColormap.
  • TypeError: If y is neither a list nor None.
  • ValueError: If x contains str which can not be converted to hex colors.
  • ValueError: If y contains str which can not be converted to hex colors.
  • ValueError: If y is not the same length as y. Only checked if y is not None.
  • TypeError: If either rgb, hcl, or palette is not bool.
  • ValueError: If all, rgb, hcl and palette are set to False as this would result in an empty plot.
  • TypeError: If 'title' is neither None nor str.