how to save a pylab figure into in-memory file which can be read into PIL image?

Question

new to PIL, but want to get a quick solution out of it. The following is my first shot which never works:

import cStringIO
import pylab
from PIL import Image         


        

Answer 1

I like having it encapsulated in a function:

def fig2img(fig):
    """Convert a Matplotlib figure to a PIL Image and return it"""
    import io
    buf = io.BytesIO()
    fig.savefig(buf)
    buf.seek(0)
    img = Image.open(buf)
    return img

Then I can call it easily this way:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from PIL import Image

x = np.arange(-3,3)
plt.plot(x)
fig = plt.gcf()

img = fig2img(fig)

img.show()