Plot histogram with colors taken from colormap

Question

I want to plot a simple 1D histogram where the bars should follow the color-coding of a given colormap.

Here\'s an MWE:

import numpy as          


        

Answer 1

The hist command returns a list of patches, so you can iterate over them and set their color like so:

import numpy as n
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Random gaussian data.
Ntotal = 1000
data = 0.05 * n.random.randn(Ntotal) + 0.5

# This is  the colormap I'd like to use.
cm = plt.cm.get_cmap('RdYlBu_r')

# Plot histogram.
n, bins, patches = plt.hist(data, 25, normed=1, color='green')
bin_centers = 0.5 * (bins[:-1] + bins[1:])

# scale values to interval [0,1]
col = bin_centers - min(bin_centers)
col /= max(col)

for c, p in zip(col, patches):
    plt.setp(p, 'facecolor', cm(c))

plt.show()

To get the colors, you need to call the colormap with a value between 0 and 1. Resulting figure: