[SciPy-user] [Matplotlib-users] Getting an RGB value from a colormap

[John Hunter]

>>>>> "mike" == mike cantor <mcantor at stanford.edu> writes:

    mike> Hi, I'd like to use the colormap interface in a different
    mike> way than it's used in plotting images.  I am plotting a
    mike> series of curves (using regular old plot), each of which
    mike> corresponds to the behavior of a biological circuit under a
    mike> different level of "inducer", ranging from around 0-100.  I
    mike> want to assign the color of each line according to the
    mike> inducer value, and I want to try out different colormaps to
    mike> see which I like best.

    mike> All I really want is a method that, for a given colormap
    mike> (jet, pink, hot, hsv, etc), takes a number between 0,1 as
    mike> input and returns the corresponding RGB value, which I can
    mike> then use a 'color' argument in a plotting command.  (I was


In [6]: import matplotlib.cm as cm
In [7]: cm.jet(.5)
Out[7]: (0.49019607843137247, 1.0, 0.47754585705249841, 1.0)

    mike> sort of hoping that the colormap object itself would provide
    mike> such a method but I couldn't find any description of it's
    mike> interface).

The class documentation is available at

  http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/classdocs.html

in particular, take a look at

  http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/matplotlib.colors.html#LinearSegmentedColormap

"jet" in the example above, is an instance of the
LinearSegmentedColormap colormap class, and the __call__ method
returns the data you are interested in for scalars or sequences.

JDH