11 Working with colors in R

You can find built-in named colors in R by using colors() function. There are 657 named colors.

You can see the color code here http://research.stowers-institute.org/efg/R/Color/Chart/ColorChart.pdf

Examples:

> x = c(4, 2, 6, 7, 8, 10)

> barplot(x, col = "steelblue") #color by name

> barplot(x, col = colors()[130]) #color by code

> barplot(x, col = "#EFEFEF") #color by hex code

> barplot(x, col = rgb(0, 0, 0.6)) #color by rgb value. Each shade value in range [0, 1]

> barplot(x, col = rgb(0, 0, 123, max = 256)) #color by rgb value

> barplot(x, col = c("darkblue", "darkred", "darkgreen")) #alternate coloring

Palette

> palette("default") #Set to default palette

> palette() #View palette

> barplot(x, col = 1:4) #display using palette colors 1 to 4.

> barplot(x, col = heat.colors(6))

More color palette:

https://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~frazier/RSpatialGuides/colorPaletteCheatsheet.pdf

Colorbrewer:

http://colorbrewer2.org/

There are 3 types of palette

  • Sequential: represents range of values, for example age groups, temperature et

  • Qualitative: represents different groups of values for example, one color shade for each political parties, color of each county in the map

Diverging: Show high and low values, for example, positive and negative approval rating on a map where each extreme values get dark shades and middle lighter color representing neutral values

There is an R package for color brewer - "RColorBrewer". Install the package if not present in your R.

> require(RColorBrewer)

Shows all named palettes from RColorBrewer package

> display.brewer.all()

Display color from a named palette

> display.brewer.pal(9, "Blues")

Before you use the color brewer palette, save the palette in a vector

> x = c(4, 5, 2, 3, 10)

> blues = brewer.pal(5, "Blues")

> barplot(x, col = blues)