Palettes {graphics}R Documentation

Color Palettes

Description

Create a vector of n “contiguous” colors.

Usage

rainbow(n, s = 1, v = 1, start = 0, end = max(1,n - 1)/n, gamma = 1)
heat.colors(n)
terrain.colors(n)
topo.colors(n)
cm.colors(n)

Arguments

n the number of colors (>= 1) to be in the palette.
s,v the “saturation” and “value” to be used to complete the HSV color descriptions.
start the (corrected) hue in [0,1] at which the rainbow begins.
end the (corrected) hue in [0,1] at which the rainbow ends.
gamma the gamma correction, see argument gamma in hsv.

Details

Conceptually, all of these functions actually use (parts of) a line cut out of the 3-dimensional color space, parametrized by hsv(h,s,v, gamma), where gamma=1 for the foo.colors function, and hence, equispaced hues in RGB space tend to cluster at the red, green and blue primaries.

Some applications such as contouring require a palette of colors which do not “wrap around” to give a final color close to the starting one.

With rainbow, the parameters start and end can be used to specify particular subranges of hues. The following values can be used when generating such a subrange: red=0, yellow=1/6, green=2/6, cyan=3/6, blue=4/6 and magenta=5/6.

Value

A character vector, cv, of color names. This can be used either to create a user–defined color palette for subsequent graphics by palette(cv), a col= specification in graphics functions or in par.

See Also

colors, palette, hsv, rgb, gray and col2rgb for translating to RGB numbers.

Examples

# A Color Wheel
pie(rep(1,12), col=rainbow(12))

##------ Some palettes ------------
demo.pal <-
  function(n, border = if (n<32) "light gray" else NA,
           main = paste("color palettes;  n=",n),
           ch.col = c("rainbow(n, start=.7, end=.1)", "heat.colors(n)",
                      "terrain.colors(n)", "topo.colors(n)", "cm.colors(n)"))
{
    nt <- length(ch.col)
    i <- 1:n; j <- n / nt; d <- j/6; dy <- 2*d
    plot(i,i+d, type="n", yaxt="n", ylab="", main=main)
    for (k in 1:nt) {
        rect(i-.5, (k-1)*j+ dy, i+.4, k*j,
             col = eval(parse(text=ch.col[k])), border = border)
        text(2*j,  k * j +dy/4, ch.col[k])
    }
}
n <- if(.Device == "postscript") 64 else 16
     # Since for screen, larger n may give color allocation problem
demo.pal(n)
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