ggplot2 (version 2.1.0)

scale_colour_brewer: Sequential, diverging and qualitative colour scales from colorbrewer.org

Description

ColorBrewer provides sequential, diverging and qualitative colour schemes which are particularly suited and tested to display discrete values (levels of a factor) on a map. ggplot2 can use those colours in discrete scales. It also allows to smoothly interpolate 6 colours from any palette to a continuous scale (6 colours per palette gives nice gradients; more results in more saturated colours which do not look as good). However, the original colour schemes (particularly the qualitative ones) were not intended for this and the perceptual result is left to the appreciation of the user. See http://colorbrewer2.org for more information.

Usage

scale_colour_brewer(..., type = "seq", palette = 1, direction = 1)
scale_fill_brewer(..., type = "seq", palette = 1, direction = 1)
scale_colour_distiller(..., type = "seq", palette = 1, direction = -1, values = NULL, space = "Lab", na.value = "grey50", guide = "colourbar")
scale_fill_distiller(..., type = "seq", palette = 1, direction = -1, values = NULL, space = "Lab", na.value = "grey50", guide = "colourbar")

Arguments

...
Other arguments passed on to discrete_scale to control name, limits, breaks, labels and so forth.
type
One of seq (sequential), div (diverging) or qual (qualitative)
palette
If a string, will use that named palette. If a number, will index into the list of palettes of appropriate type
direction
Sets the order of colors in the scale. If 1, the default, colors are as output by brewer.pal. If -1, the order of colors is reversed.
values
if colours should not be evenly positioned along the gradient this vector gives the position (between 0 and 1) for each colour in the colours vector. See rescale for a convience function to map an arbitrary range to between 0 and 1.
space
colour space in which to calculate gradient. Must be "Lab" - other values are deprecated.
na.value
Colour to use for missing values
guide
Type of legend. Use "colourbar" for continuous colour bar, or "legend" for discrete colour legend.

Palettes

The following palettes are available for use with these scales:
Diverging
BrBG, PiYG, PRGn, PuOr, RdBu, RdGy, RdYlBu, RdYlGn, Spectral
Qualitative
Accent, Dark2, Paired, Pastel1, Pastel2, Set1, Set2, Set3
Sequential
Blues, BuGn, BuPu, GnBu, Greens, Greys, Oranges, OrRd, PuBu, PuBuGn, PuRd, Purples, RdPu, Reds, YlGn, YlGnBu, YlOrBr, YlOrRd

See Also

Other colour scales: scale_colour_gradient, scale_colour_grey, scale_colour_hue

Examples

Run this code
dsamp <- diamonds[sample(nrow(diamonds), 1000), ]
(d <- ggplot(dsamp, aes(carat, price)) +
  geom_point(aes(colour = clarity)))

# Change scale label
d + scale_colour_brewer()
d + scale_colour_brewer("Diamond\nclarity")

# Select brewer palette to use, see ?scales::brewer_pal for more details
d + scale_colour_brewer(palette = "Greens")
d + scale_colour_brewer(palette = "Set1")


# scale_fill_brewer works just the same as
# scale_colour_brewer but for fill colours
p <- ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = price, fill = cut)) +
  geom_histogram(position = "dodge", binwidth = 1000)
p + scale_fill_brewer()
# the order of colour can be reversed
p + scale_fill_brewer(direction = -1)
# the brewer scales look better on a darker background
p + scale_fill_brewer(direction = -1) + theme_dark()


# Use distiller variant with continous data
v <- ggplot(faithfuld) +
  geom_tile(aes(waiting, eruptions, fill = density))
v
v + scale_fill_distiller()
v + scale_fill_distiller(palette = "Spectral")

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