get color ramp by name, color, or function

getColorRamp(
  col,
  n = 15,
  trimRamp = c(0, 0),
  gradientN = 15,
  defaultBaseColor = "grey99",
  reverseRamp = FALSE,
  alpha = TRUE,
  gradientWtFactor = NULL,
  dex = 1,
  lens = 0,
  divergent = NULL,
  verbose = FALSE,
  ...
)

Arguments

col

one of the following:

character vector of two or more R colors. A color gradient will be defined using these colors in order with colorRampPalette().
character vector length=1 with one R color. A color gradient is defined from defaultBaseColor to col using color2gradient(). To adjust the range of light to dark luminance, use the dex argument, where higher values increase the range, and lower values decrease the range.
character vector length=1, with one recognized color ramp name: any color palette from rownames(RColorBrewer::brewer.pal.info()); any color palette function name from viridis; any color palette from colorjam::jam_linear() or colorjam::jam_divergent().
character vector length=1, with one color function name, for example col="rainbow_hcl". Input is equivalent to supplying one color function, see below.
function whose first argument expects integer number of colors to return, for example col=viridis::viridis defines the function itself as input.
function derived from circlize::colorRamp2(), recognized by having attribute names "breaks" and "colors". Note that only the colors are used for the individual color values, not the break points.

n

integer number of output colors to return, or NULL if the output should be a color function in the form function(n) which returns n colors.

trimRamp

integer vector, expanded to length=2 as needed, which defines the number of colors to trim from the beginning and end of the color vector, respectively. When reverseRamp=TRUE, the colors are reversed before the trimming is applied. If the two trimRamp values are not identical, symmetric divergent color scales will no longer be symmetric.

gradientN

integer number of colors to expand gradient colors prior to trimming colors.

defaultBaseColor

character vector indicating a color from which to begin a color gradient, only used when col is a single color.

reverseRamp

logical indicating whether to reverse the resulting color ramp. This value is ignored when a single value is supplied for col, and where "_r" or "_rev" is detected as a substring at the end of the character value.

alpha

logical indicating whether to honor alpha transparency whenever colorRampPalette is called. If colors contain no alpha transparency, this setting has no effect, otherwise the alpha value is applied by grDevices::colorRampPalette() using a linear gradient between each color.

gradientWtFactor

numeric value used to expand single color input to a gradient, using color2gradient(), prior to making a full gradient to the defaultBaseColor. Note that dex is the preferred method for adjusting the range of light to dark for the given color col.

dex

numeric darkness expansion factor, used only with input col is a single color, which is then split into a color gradient using defaultBaseColor by calling color2gradient(). The dex factor adjusts the range of dark to light colors, where higher values for dex increase the range, making the changes more dramatic.

lens, divergent

arguments sent to warpRamp() to apply a warp effect to the color ramp, to compress or expand the color gradient: lens scales the warp effect, with positive values compressing colors toward baseline and negative values expanding colors near baseline; divergent is a logical indicating whether the middle color is considered the baseline.

verbose

logical whether to print verbose output

...

additional arguments are ignored.

Details

This function accepts a color ramp name, a single color, a vector of colors, or a function names, and returns a simple vector of colors of the appropriate length, suitable as input to a number of plotting functions.

When n is NULL, this function returns a color function, wrapped by grDevices::colorRampPalette(). The colors used are defined by gradientN, so the grDevices::colorRampPalette() function actually uses a starting palette of gradientN number of colors.

When n is an integer greater than 0, this function returns a vector of colors with length n.

When col is a single color value, a color gradient is created by appending defaultColorBase to the output of color2gradient(..., n=3, gradientWtFactor=gradientWtFactor). These 4 colors are used as the internal palette before applying grDevices::colorRampPalette() as appropriate. In this case, gradientWtFactor is used to adjust the strength of the color gradient. The intended use is: getColorRamp("red", n=5). To remove the leading white color, use getColorRamp("red", n=5, trimRamp=c(1,0)).

When col contains multiple color values, they are used to define a color ramp directly.

When col is not a color value, it is compared to known color palettes from RColorBrewer::RColorBrewer and viridisLite, and will use the corresponding color function or color palette.

When col refers to a color palette, the suffix "_r" may be used to reverse the colors. For example, getColorRamp(col="RdBu_r", n=9) will recognize the RColorBrewer color palette "RdBu", and will reverse the colors to return blue to red, more suitable for heatmaps where high values associated with heat are colored red, and low values associated with cold are colored blue.

The argument reverseRamp=TRUE may be used to reverse the returned colors.

Color functions from viridisLite are recognized: "viridis", "cividis", "inferno", "magma", "plasma".

The argument trimRamp is used to trim colors from the beginning and end of a color ramp, respectively. This mechanism is useful to remove the first or last color when those colors may be too extreme. Note that internally, colors are expanded to length gradientN, then trimmed, then the corresponding n colors are returned.

The trimRamp argument is also useful when returning a color function, which occurs when n=NULL. In this case, colors are expanded to length gradientN, then are trimmed using the values from trimRamp, then the returned function can be used to create a color ramp of arbitrary length.

Note that when reverseRamp=TRUE, colors are reversed before trimRamp is applied.

By default, alpha transparency will be maintained if supplied in the input color vector. Most color ramps have no transparency, in which case transparency can be added after the fact using alpha2col().

Examples

# get a gradient using red4
red4 <- getColorRamp("red4");
showColors(getColorRamp(red4));


# make a custom gradient
BuOr <- getColorRamp(c("dodgerblue","grey10","orange"));
showColors(BuOr);

colorList <- list(red4=red4, BuOr=BuOr);

# If RColorBrewer is available, use a brewer name
if (suppressPackageStartupMessages(require(RColorBrewer))) {
   RdBu <- getColorRamp("RdBu");
   RdBu_r <- getColorRamp("RdBu_r");
   colorList <- c(colorList, list(RdBu=RdBu, RdBu_r=RdBu_r));
   showColors(RdBu);
}


if (suppressPackageStartupMessages(require(viridis))) {
   viridisV <- getColorRamp("viridis");
   colorList <- c(colorList, list(viridis=viridisV));
}

# for fun, put a few color ramps onto one plot
showColors(colorList, cexCellnote=0.7);


showColors(list(`white background\ncolor='red'`=getColorRamp("red"),
   `black background\ncolor='red'`=getColorRamp("red", defaultBaseColor="black"),
   `white background\ncolor='gold'`=getColorRamp("gold"),
   `black background\ncolor='gold'`=getColorRamp("gold", defaultBaseColor="black")))

get color ramp by name, color, or function

Arguments

Details

See also

Examples