ColorBrewer
ColorBrewer palettes
Creates nice looking color palettes especially for thematic maps
- Keywords
- color
Usage
brewer.pal(n, name)
display.brewer.pal(n, name)
display.brewer.all(n=NULL, type="all", select=NULL, exact.n=TRUE)Arguments
- n
- Number of different colors in the palette, minimum 3, maximum depending on palette
- name
- A palette name from the lists below
- type
- One of the string "div", "qual", "seq", or "all"
- select
- A list of names of existing palettes
- exact.n
- If TRUE, only display palettes with a color number given by n
Details
brewer.pal makes the color palettes from ColorBrewer
available as R palettes.
display.brewer.pal displays the selected palette in a graphics window.
display.brewer.all displays the a few palettes simultanueously in a graphics window.
brewer.all.info returns information about the available palettes as a dataframe.
For details and an interactive palette selection tools see http://colorbrewer.org.
It is free to use, although ColorBrewer's designers would appreciate it if you could cite the ColorBrewer project
if you decide to use one of our color schemes.
There are 3 types of palettes, sequential, diverging, and qualitative.
1. Sequential palettes are suited to ordered data that progress from low to high.
Lightness steps dominate the look of these schemes, with light colors for low data values
to dark colors for high data values.
2. Diverging palettes put equal emphasis on mid-range critical values and extremes at both ends
of the data range. The critical class or break in the middle of the legend is emphasized
with light colors and low and high extremes are emphasized with dark colors that have
contrasting hues.
3. Qualitative palettes do not imply magnitude differences between legend classes,
and hues are used to create the primary visual differences between classes.
Qualitative schemes are best suited to representing nominal or categorical data.
The sequential palettes names are
Blues
BuGn
BuPu
GnBu
Greens
Greys
Oranges
OrRd
PuBu
PuBuGn
PuRd
Purples
RdPu
Reds
YlGn
YlGnBu
YlOrBr
YlOrRd
All the sequential palettes are available in variations from 3 different values up to 9 different values.
The diverging palettes are
BrBG
PiYG
PRGn
PuOr
RdBu
RdGy
RdYlBu
RdYlGn
Spectral
All the diverging palettes are available in variations from 3 different values up to 11 different values.
For qualitative palettes, the lowest number of distinct values available always is 3, but the largest number
is different for different palettes. It is given together with the palette names in the following table.
COPYING included in this package.
Value
- A palette You will get an error when you ask for a nonexisting palette, and you will get a warning if a palette you asked for exists but not with as many different leves as you asked for.
Examples
## create a sequential palette for usage and show colors
mypalette<-brewer.pal(7,"Greens")
image(1:7,1,as.matrix(1:7),col=mypalette,xlab="Greens (sequential)",
ylab="",xaxt="n",yaxt="n",bty="n")
Sys.sleep(2)
## display a divergent palette
display.brewer.pal(7,"BrBG")
Sys.sleep(2)
## display a qualitative palette
display.brewer.pal(7,"Accent")
Sys.sleep(2)
## display a palettes simultanoeusly
display.brewer.all(n=10, exact.n=FALSE)
Sys.sleep(2)
display.brewer.all(n=10)
Sys.sleep(2)
display.brewer.all()
Sys.sleep(2)
display.brewer.all(type="div")
Sys.sleep(2)
display.brewer.all(type="seq")
Sys.sleep(2)
display.brewer.all(type="qual")
Sys.sleep(2)
display.brewer.all(n=5,type="div",exact.n=TRUE)
Sys.sleep(2)
brewer.pal.info
brewer.pal.info["Blues",]
brewer.pal.info["Blues",]$maxcolors