Prettier default plot colors in matplotlib

Solution 1:

You can use Matplotlib's style sheets. It has been ported from the mpltools library which has a style module that redefine matplotlib rc parameters.

As an example, see the use of the ggplot style and Matplotlib's manual.

Solution 2:

The question was asked 2 years ago, and today it's much easier to get better style for your plot. You don't even need external packages for that. As @asmaier mentioned in his comment, mpltools.style functionality has been integrated into Matplotlib 1.4, so you can switch styles with:

plt.style.use(style_name)

For example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

plt.style.use('ggplot')

num_lines = 6

ax = plt.subplot(111)

for i in range(num_lines):
    x = np.linspace(0,20,200)
    ax.plot(x,np.sin(x)+i)

plt.show()

You can list all available styles with:

print plt.style.available

In Matplotlib 1.5 several new styles have been added, including many styles from the Seaborn project:

plt.style.use('seaborn-dark-palette')

Solution 3:

Have a look at prettyplotlib a library — just pointed out to me recently by friends — that modifies matplotlib to be better aligned with the ideas of Edward Tufte, as well as some very carefully studied work by Cynthia Brewer on color perception.

Solution 4:

The Seaborn package (based on Matplotlib) has nice default graph styles, and I've found that it's a nice way to create an appealing color-cycle.

They have a nice discussion of the colorpalettes here: https://stanford.edu/~mwaskom/software/seaborn/tutorial/color_palettes.html

The following code demonstrates how you can pick a new color_cycle automatically for a simple line plot:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import seaborn as sns   

num_lines = 6

ax = plt.subplot(111)
ax.set_color_cycle(sns.color_palette("coolwarm_r",num_lines))

for i in range(num_lines):
    x = np.linspace(0,20,200)
    ax.plot(x,np.sin(x)+i)

plt.show()

If you want to just change the linecolors and not use the other seaborn pre-sets such as the gray background, just import seaborn with

import seaborn.apionly as sns

Solution 5:

You can setup a .matplotlibrc file. A really heavily commented example is here. It looks to me like the option you want to change is axes.color_cycle. I don't have any advice on what to make it for a prettier interface -- That's a little too subjective Stack Overflow ;-) (and I'm happy with the defaults)