Table of Contents

About

Color Space Manipulation.

The package colorspace provides various functions providing perceptually-based color palettes for coding:

  • categorical data (qualitative palettes)
  • and numerical variables (sequential and diverging palettes).

The R package colorspace carries out mapping between assorted color spaces. Qualitative, sequential, and diverging color palettes based on HCL colors are provided.

GUI

A graphical user interface for choosing colors based on the ideas of Zeileis et al. (2009) is provided in the package as choose_palette(). 

library("colorspace")
myPalette <- choose_palette()

Colorspace Choose Color Gui

Example

Convenience function for the examples 

library("colorspace")
pal <- function(col, border = "light gray", ...)
{
    n <- length(col)
    plot(0, 0, type="n", xlim = c(0, 1), ylim = c(0, 1), axes = FALSE, xlab = "", ylab = "", ...)
    rect(0:(n-1)/n, 0, 1:n/n, 1, col = col, border = border)
}

Qualitative Palette

pal(rainbow_hcl(4, start = 30, end = 300), main = "dynamic")
pal(rainbow_hcl(4, start = 60, end = 240), main = "harmonic")
pal(rainbow_hcl(4, start = 270, end = 150), main = "cold")
pal(rainbow_hcl(4, start = 90, end = -30), main = "warm")

Qualitative Palette

Examples for qualitative palettes. Hue is varied in different intervals for given C(hroma) = 50 and L(uminance) = 70.

Documentation / Reference