Only one colorbar for a figure?

Community matplotlib-users
1

Hi list;

I am trying to do an imshow() comparison of four different data sets
(astronomical photos), and since I want to show the differences in
strength, I use fixed vmin and vmax.

I would very much like one and only one colour bar for the entire
figure, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do it without
creating an entire subplot for it, and that is really kludgey and
unhandy.

I tried the Interwebz but have had no luck figuring it out.

Cheers;

Emil

2

2011/1/14 Thøger Emil Juul Thorsen <thoeger@…845…>

Hi list;

I am trying to do an imshow() comparison of four different data sets

(astronomical photos), and since I want to show the differences in

strength, I use fixed vmin and vmax.

I would very much like one and only one colour bar for the entire

figure, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to do it without

creating an entire subplot for it, and that is really kludgey and

unhandy.

I tried the Interwebz but have had no luck figuring it out.

Cheers;

Emil

Emil,

I had this problem once before. You can use the axes_grid1 tool to do this:

http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/mpl_toolkits/axes_grid/users/overview.html

Unfortunately, our documentation is a little broken on that page, but if you take a look at this source code example, you can see how to use AxesGrid to create a subplot grid that pre-allocates space for a single cbar automatically!

http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/plot_directive/mpl_toolkits/axes_grid/examples/demo_axes_grid.py

I hope this helps!

Ben Root