figure of imshow() is too small

Question

I\'m trying to visualize a numpy array using imshow() since it\'s similar to imagesc() in Matlab.

imshow(random.rand(8, 90), interpolation=\'nearest\')
         


        

Answer 1

If you don't give an aspect argument to imshow, it will use the value for image.aspect in your matplotlibrc. The default for this value in a new matplotlibrc is equal. So imshow will plot your array with equal aspect ratio.

If you don't need an equal aspect you can set aspect to auto

imshow(random.rand(8, 90), interpolation='nearest', aspect='auto')

which gives the following figure

If you want an equal aspect ratio you have to adapt your figsize according to the aspect

fig, ax = subplots(figsize=(18, 2))
ax.imshow(random.rand(8, 90), interpolation='nearest')
tight_layout()

which gives you: