import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np cmaps = [('Perceptually Uniform Sequential', [ 'viridis', 'plasma', 'inferno', 'magma', 'cividis']), ('Sequential', [ 'Greys', 'Purples', 'Blues', 'Greens', 'Oranges', 'Reds', 'YlOrBr', 'YlOrRd', 'OrRd', 'PuRd', 'RdPu', 'BuPu', 'GnBu', 'PuBu', 'YlGnBu', 'PuBuGn', 'BuGn', 'YlGn']), ('Sequential (2)', [ 'gray', 'bone', 'pink', 'spring', 'summer', 'autumn', 'winter', 'cool', 'Wistia', 'hot', 'afmhot', 'gist_heat', 'copper']), ('Diverging', [ 'PiYG', 'PRGn', 'BrBG', 'PuOr', 'RdGy', 'RdBu', 'RdYlBu', 'RdYlGn', 'Spectral', 'coolwarm', 'bwr', 'seismi

There are also external libraries that have many extra colormaps, which can be viewed in the Third-party colormaps section of the Matplotlib documentation. Here we briefly discuss how to choose between the many options. For help on creating your own colormaps, see Creating Colormaps in Matplotlib. To get a list of all registered colormaps, you can do:

May 16, 2025 - Matplotlib Colormap Showcase: Choosing the Right Palette 🎨Why Do Colormaps Matter So Much?Notebook Structure 🗂️

""" import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt # Have colormaps separated into categories: # http://matplotlib.org/examples/color/colormaps_reference.html cmaps = [('Perceptually Uniform Sequential', [ 'viridis', 'plasma', 'inferno', 'magma']), ('Sequential', [ 'Greys', 'Purples', 'Blues', 'Greens', 'Oranges', 'Reds', 'YlOrBr', 'YlOrRd', 'OrRd', 'PuRd', 'RdPu', 'BuPu', 'GnBu', 'PuBu', 'YlGnBu', 'PuBuGn', 'BuGn', 'YlGn']), ('Sequential (2)', [ 'binary', 'gist_yarg', 'gist_gray', 'gray', 'bone', 'pink', 'spring', 'summer', 'autumn', 'winter', 'cool', 'Wistia', 'hot', 'afmhot', 'gist_heat

July 29, 2026 - Full list of matplotlib colormaps (viridis, plasma, coolwarm, tab10...) grouped by type. Click on a colormap to copy its name and use it with the cmap argument.

Update: These colormaps have been merged into the development version of Matplotlib, all of them will be included in matplotlib 1.5, and "option D" (now called "viridis") will be the new default colormap in matplotlib 2.0. If you just want the colormaps themselves, they're available in a single file here under a CC0 "no rights reserved" license.

January 2, 2026 - Nowadays, developers are exploring new Python packages with modern styles such as Seaborn, Plotly, and even Pandas, while Matplotlib, with its enduring appeal, remains in many programmers’ hearts. Matplotlib, a widely-used data visualization library, offers numerous built-in colormaps.

December 23, 2024 - Matplotlib offers many built-in colormaps, such as viridis, plasma, and copper, which are stored in the matplotlib.colormaps container.

Matplotlib has support for visualizing information with a wide array of colors and colormaps.

Colormaps are preset lists/sequences/maps of colors that Matplotlib already has packaged up for us, ready to use. To see all available color maps, you can use the command below (or look at the second link above):

Matplotlib provides number of built-in colormaps like 'viridis' or 'copper', those can be accessed through matplotlib.colormaps container. It is an universal registry instance, which returns a colormap object. Following is the example that gets the list of all registered colormaps in matplotlib.

December 15, 2023 - The cmap parameter is the Colormap. Here we can choose the name of a Colormap provided by Matplotlib.

Colormaps is a library of collection of colormaps or color palettes for Python. It’s written in Python with matplotlib and numpy as dependencies.

June 17, 2020 - import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt cmaps = [('Perceptually Uniform Sequential', [ 'viridis', 'plasma', 'inferno', 'magma', 'cividis']), ('Sequential', [ 'Greys', 'Purples', 'Blues', 'Greens', 'Oranges', 'Reds', 'YlOrBr', 'YlOrRd', 'OrRd', 'PuRd', 'RdPu', 'BuPu', 'GnBu', 'PuBu', 'YlGnBu', 'PuBuGn', 'BuGn', 'YlGn']), ('Sequential (2)', [ 'binary', 'gist_yarg', 'gist_gray', 'gray', 'bone', 'pink', 'spring', 'summer', 'autumn', 'winter', 'cool', 'Wistia', 'hot', 'afmhot', 'gist_heat', 'copper']), ('Diverging', [ 'PiYG', 'PRGn', 'BrBG', 'PuOr', 'RdGy', 'RdBu', 'RdYlBu', 'RdYlGn', 'S

Note that all the colors from Matplotlib's qualitative color maps are also available as color sequences, so may be accessed more directly from the color sequence registry. See Named color sequences. colors = mpl.colormaps['Dark2'].colors fig, ax = plt.subplots(layout='constrained') for i, color in enumerate(colors): ax.plot([0, i], color=color) plt.show()

May 1, 2020 - import numpy as np import matplotlib.pyplot as plt cmaps = [('Perceptually Uniform Sequential', [ 'viridis', 'plasma', 'inferno', 'magma', 'cividis']), ('Sequential', [ 'Greys', 'Purples', 'Blues', 'Greens', 'Oranges', 'Reds', 'YlOrBr', 'YlOrRd', 'OrRd', 'PuRd', 'RdPu', 'BuPu', 'GnBu', 'PuBu', 'YlGnBu', 'PuBuGn', 'BuGn', 'YlGn']), ('Sequential (2)', [ 'binary', 'gist_yarg', 'gist_gray', 'gray', 'bone', 'pink', 'spring', 'summer', 'autumn', 'winter', 'cool', 'Wistia', 'hot', 'afmhot', 'gist_heat', 'copper']), ('Diverging', [ 'PiYG', 'PRGn', 'BrBG', 'PuOr', 'RdGy', 'RdBu', 'RdYlBu', 'RdYlGn', 'S

February 12, 2026 - Use a single-hue palette and subtle patterns vanish into a wall of nearly identical shades. The difference between a chart that reveals insight and one that hides it often comes down to one decision: the colormap. Matplotlib ships with over 150 built-in colormaps and a flexible API for building ...

Using colormaps is quite simple: add the cmap='CMAP_NAME' option to the plotting function you are using and MatPlotLib will handle the rest.

November 9, 2022 - ... In this article, we will cover the two most popular types of color maps: Listed Colormaps and Linearly Segmented Colormaps · To create simple colormaps, we pass a NumPy array in the cmap() function as an argument and then use a type like Viridis. However, in Listed Colormaps, we do the ...