Display image as grayscale using matplotlib

Solution 1:

The following code will load an image from a file image.png and will display it as grayscale.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from PIL import Image

fname = 'image.png'
image = Image.open(fname).convert("L")
arr = np.asarray(image)
plt.imshow(arr, cmap='gray', vmin=0, vmax=255)
plt.show()

If you want to display the inverse grayscale, switch the cmap to cmap='gray_r'.

Solution 2:

Try to use a grayscale colormap?

E.g. something like

imshow(..., cmap=pyplot.cm.binary)

For a list of colormaps, see http://scipy-cookbook.readthedocs.org/items/Matplotlib_Show_colormaps.html

Solution 3:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

You can also run once in your code

plt.gray()

This will show the images in grayscale as default

im = array(Image.open('I_am_batman.jpg').convert('L'))
plt.imshow(im)
plt.show()