Colors

There are multiple ways to specify colors in Makie. Most plot objects allow passing an array as the color attribute, where there must be as many color elements as there are visual elements (scatter markers, line segments, polygons, etc.). Alternatively, one can pass a single color element which is applied to all visual elements at once.

When passing an array of numbers or a single number, the values are converted to colors using the colormap and colorrange attributes. By default, the colorrange spans the range of the color values, but it can be fixed manually as well. For example, this can be useful for picking categorical colors. The number 1 will pick the first and the number 2 the second color from the 10-color categorical map :tab10, for example, if the colorrange is set to (1, 10).

NaN values are usually displayed with :transparent color, so they are invisible. This can be changed with the attribute nan_color.

If values exceed the colorrange at the low or high end, by default the start or end color of the map is picked, unless the lowclip and highclip attributes are set to some other color.

Alpha or Opacity

There are no alpha or opacity keywords in Makie. Instead, one can make partially transparent colors or colormaps by using a tuple (color, alpha).

Cheat Sheet

Here's a little cheat sheet showing common color specifications:

using CairoMakie
using Makie.Colors

theme = Attributes(
    Scatter = (; markersize = 40),
    Text = (; align = (:center, :bottom), offset = (0, 30))
)

with_theme(theme) do

    f = Figure(resolution = (800, 1200))
    ax = Axis(f[1, 1], xautolimitmargin = (0.2, 0.2), yautolimitmargin = (0.1, 0.1))
    hidedecorations!(ax)
    hidespines!(ax)

    scatter!(ax, 1, 1, color = :red)
    text!(ax, 1, 1, text = ":red")

    scatter!(ax, 2, 1, color = (:red, 0.5))
    text!(ax, 2, 1, text = "(:red, 0.5)")

    scatter!(ax, 3, 1, color = RGBf(0.5, 0.2, 0.8))
    text!(ax, 3, 1, text = "RGBf(0.5, 0.2, 0.8)")
    
    scatter!(ax, 4, 1, color = RGBAf(0.5, 0.2, 0.8, 0.5))
    text!(ax, 4, 1, text = "RGBAf(0.5, 0.2, 0.8, 0.5)")

    scatter!(ax, 1, 0, color = Colors.HSV(40, 30, 60))
    text!(ax, 1, 0, text = "Colors.HSV(40, 30, 60)")

    scatter!(ax, 2, 0, color = 1, colormap = :tab10, colorrange = (1, 10))
    text!(ax, 2, 0, text = "color = 1\ncolormap = :tab10\ncolorrange = (1, 10)")

    scatter!(ax, 3, 0, color = 2, colormap = :tab10, colorrange = (1, 10))
    text!(ax, 3, 0, text = "color = 2\ncolormap = :tab10\ncolorrange = (1, 10)")

    scatter!(ax, 4, 0, color = 3, colormap = :tab10, colorrange = (1, 10))
    text!(ax, 4, 0, text = "color = 3\ncolormap = :tab10\ncolorrange = (1, 10)")

    text!(ax, 2.5, -1, text = "color = 1:10\ncolormap = :viridis\ncolorrange = automatic")
    scatter!(ax, range(1, 4, length = 10), fill(-1, 10), color = 1:10, colormap = :viridis)

    text!(ax, 2.5, -2, text = "color = [1, 2, 3, 4, NaN, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]\ncolormap = :viridis\ncolorrange = (2, 9)")
    scatter!(ax, range(1, 4, length = 10), fill(-2, 10), color = [1, 2, 3, 4, NaN, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10], colormap = :viridis, colorrange = (2, 9))

    text!(ax, 2.5, -3, text = "color = [1, 2, 3, 4, NaN, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]\ncolormap = :viridis\ncolorrange = (2, 9)\nnan_color = :red, highclip = :magenta, lowclip = :cyan")
    scatter!(ax, range(1, 4, length = 10), fill(-3, 10), color = [1, 2, 3, 4, NaN, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10], colormap = :viridis, colorrange = (2, 9), nan_color = :red, highclip = :magenta, lowclip = :cyan)
    
    text!(ax, 2.5, -4, text = "color = HSV.(range(0, 360, 10), 50, 50)")
    scatter!(ax, range(1, 4, length = 10), fill(-4, 10), color = HSV.(range(0, 360, 10), 50, 50))

    text!(ax, 2.5, -5, text = "color = 1:10\ncolormap = (:viridis, 0.5)\ncolorrange = automatic")
    scatter!(ax, range(1, 4, length = 10), fill(-5, 10), color = 1:10, colormap = (:viridis, 0.5))

    text!(ax, 2.5, -6, text = "color = 1:10\ncolormap = [:red, :orange, :brown]\ncolorrange = automatic")
    scatter!(ax, range(1, 4, length = 10), fill(-6, 10), color = 1:10, colormap = [:red, :orange, :brown])
    
    text!(ax, 2.5, -7, text = "color = 1:10\ncolormap = Reverse(:viridis)\ncolorrange = automatic")
    scatter!(ax, range(1, 4, length = 10), fill(-7, 10), color = 1:10, colormap = Reverse(:viridis))

    f
end

Named colors

Named colors in Makie.jl (e.g., :blue) are parsed using Colors.jl and thus have a large array of possibilities under CSS specifications. You can find a plotted table of all possible names in this page.

Colormaps

Makie's default categorical color palette used for cycling is a reordered version of the one presented in Wong (2011).

Makie's default continuous color map is :viridis which is a perceptually uniform colormap originally developed for matplotlib.

using CairoMakie

f, ax, sc = scatter(1:7, fill(1, 7), color = Makie.wong_colors(), markersize = 50)
hidedecorations!(ax)
hidespines!(ax)
text!(ax, 4, 1, text = "Makie.wong_colors()",
    align = (:center, :bottom), offset = (0, 30))
scatter!(range(1, 7, 20), fill(0, 20), color = 1:20, markersize = 50)
text!(ax, 4, 0, text = ":viridis",
    align = (:center, :bottom), offset = (0, 30))
ylims!(ax, -1, 2)
f

The following is a list of all the colormaps accessible via a Symbol in Makie which are defined in ColorSchemes.jl:

misc

These colorschemes are not defined or provide different colors in ColorSchemes.jl They are kept for compatibility with the old behaviour of Makie, before v0.10.

The following colorschemes are defined by ColorSchemes.jl.

cmocean

scientific