Reverse colormap in matplotlib

Question

I would like to know how to simply reverse the color order of a given colormap in order to use it with plot_surface.

Answer 1

There is no built-in way (yet) of reversing arbitrary colormaps, but one simple solution is to actually not modify the colorbar but to create an inverting Normalize object:

from matplotlib.colors import Normalize

class InvertedNormalize(Normalize):
    def __call__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        return 1 - super(InvertedNormalize, self).__call__(*args, **kwargs)

You can then use this with plot_surface and other Matplotlib plotting functions by doing e.g.

inverted_norm = InvertedNormalize(vmin=10, vmax=100)
ax.plot_surface(..., cmap=, norm=inverted_norm)

This will work with any Matplotlib colormap.