Transparent equivalent of given color

Question

I\'ve had this a few times, so here goes: I\'m making some plots which hold curves with estimates of a parameter given a tuning parameter.

Typically, I also have SDs

Answer 1

I think is more common to specify alpha in [0,1]. This function do that, plus accept several colors as arguments:

makeTransparent = function(..., alpha=0.5) {

  if(alpha<0 | alpha>1) stop("alpha must be between 0 and 1")

  alpha = floor(255*alpha)  
  newColor = col2rgb(col=unlist(list(...)), alpha=FALSE)

  .makeTransparent = function(col, alpha) {
    rgb(red=col[1], green=col[2], blue=col[3], alpha=alpha, maxColorValue=255)
  }

  newColor = apply(newColor, 2, .makeTransparent, alpha=alpha)

  return(newColor)

}

And, to test:

makeTransparent(2, 4)
[1] "#FF00007F" "#0000FF7F"
makeTransparent("red", "blue")
[1] "#FF00007F" "#0000FF7F"
makeTransparent(rgb(1,0,0), rgb(0,0,1))
[1] "#FF00007F" "#0000FF7F"

makeTransparent("red", "blue", alpha=0.8)
[1] "#FF0000CC" "#0000FFCC"