Palettable (formerly brewer2mpl) is a library of color palettes for Python. It's written in pure Python with no dependencies, but it can supply color maps for matplotlib. You can use Palettable to customize matplotlib plots or supply colors for a web application.

Palettable has color palettes from:

Documentation

Installation

Palettable is available on PyPI for installation via pip: pip install palettable. Palettable is compatible with Python 2.6, 2.7, and Python 3.

Finding Palettes

Palettes are pre-built and loaded at import time. They have a naming convention of <Name>_<number of colors>. For example, the Colorbrewer2 palette Dark2 with seven colors is named Dark2_7. Every palette also has a reversed version with the same name plus the suffix _r (e.g. Dark2_7_r).

The modules with palettes are:

The Dark2_7 palette could be imported via:

from palettable.colorbrewer.qualitative import Dark2_7

Palette Interface

All the palette instances have a common interface including these attributes:

name
The name of the palette.
type
One of 'diverging', 'qualitative', or 'sequential'.
number
The number of defined colors in the palette.
colors
The defined colors in the palette as a list of RGB tuples in the range 0-255.
hex_colors
Colors as a list of hex strings (e.g. '#A912F4').
mpl_colors
Colors as a list of RGB tuples in the range 0-1 as used by matplotlib.
mpl_colormap
A continuous, interpolated matplotlib LinearSegmentedColormap.

Palettes also have these methods:

get_mpl_colormap
Use this method to get a matplotlib color map and pass custom keyword arguments to LinearSegmentedColormap.from_list.
show_as_blocks
Show the defined colors of the palette in the IPython Notebook. Requires ipythonblocks to be installed.
show_discrete_image
Show the defined colors of the palette in the IPython Notebook. Requires Matplotlib Palettes to be installed.
show_continuous_image
Show the continuous, interpolated palette in the IPython Notebook. Requires Matplotlib Palettes to be installed.
save_discrete_image
Save an image of the defined colors of palette to a file. Requires Matplotlib Palettes to be installed.
save_continuous_image
Save an image of the continuous, interpolated palette to a file. Requires Matplotlib Palettes to be installed.

Cookbook

matplotlib Color Cycle

matplotlib follows a default color cycle when drawing a plot. This can be modified as described in this example. To substitute a Palettable palette use the .mpl_colors attribute:

ax.set_prop_cycle('color', palettable.colorbrewer.qualitative.Dark2_8.mpl_colors)

matplotlib Colormap

Many matplotlib functions and methods take a cmap argument. You can use the .mpl_colormap attribute with this:

from palettable.colorbrewer.sequential import Blues_8
ax.imshow(data, cmap=Blues_8.mpl_colormap)

Note that the colorbrewer2 color palettes are all available in Matplotlib Palettes already. See the full list of available color maps in matplotlib here: http://matplotlib.org/examples/color/colormaps_reference.html.

matplotlib Discrete Colormap

The .mpl_colormap attribute is a continuous, interpolated map. If you want to make discrete color map you can use matplotlib's ListedColormap:

cmap = ListedColormap(palettable.colorbrewer.qualitative.Dark2_7.mpl_colors)

Contact

Palettable is on GitHub at https://github.com/jiffyclub/palettable. Please report issues there.