How to change plot background color

Question

I am making a scatter plot in matplotlib and need to change the background of the actual plot to black   I know how to change the face color of the plot using   fig   plt figure   fig patch set facecolor  xkcd mint green       My issue is that this changes the color of the space around the plot  How to I change the actual background color of the plot

User · Answer

One suggestion in other answers is to use ax.set_axis_bgcolor("red"). This however is deprecated, and doesn't work on MatPlotLib >= v2.0.

There is also the suggestion to use ax.patch.set_facecolor("red") (works on both MatPlotLib v1.5 & v2.2). While this works fine, an even easier solution for v2.0+ is to use

`ax.set_facecolor("red")`

User · Answer

One method is to manually set the default for the axis background color within your script  see Customizing matplotlib    import matplotlib pyplot as plt plt rcParams  axes facecolor      black    This is in contrast to Nick T s method which changes the background color for a specific axes object  Resetting the defaults is useful if you re making multiple different plots with similar styles and don t want to keep changing different axes objects   Note  The equivalent for   fig   plt figure   fig patch set facecolor  black     from your question is    plt rcParams  figure facecolor      black

User · Answer

Use the set facecolor color  method of the axes object  which you ve created one of the following ways    You created a figure and axis es together  fig  ax   plt subplots nrows 1  ncols 1   You created a figure  then axis es later  fig   plt figure   ax   fig add subplot 1  1  1    nrows  ncols  index  You used the stateful API  if you re doing anything more than a few lines  and especially if you have multiple plots  the object-oriented methods above make life easier because you can refer to specific figures  plot on certain axes  and customize either   plt plot      ax   plt gca      Then you can use set facecolor   ax set facecolor  xkcd salmon   ax set facecolor  1 0  0 47  0 42       As a refresher for what colors can be      matplotlib colors      Matplotlib recognizes the following formats to specify a color          an RGB or RGBA tuple of float values in  0  1   e g    0 1  0 2  0 5  or  0 1  0 2  0 5  0 3      a hex RGB or RGBA string  e g     0F0F0F  or   0F0F0F0F      a string representation of a float value in  0  1  inclusive for gray level  e g    0 5      one of   b    g    r    c    m    y    k    w      a X11 CSS4 color name    a name from the xkcd color survey  prefixed with  xkcd    e g    xkcd sky blue      one of   tab blue    tab orange    tab green    tab red    tab purple    tab brown    tab pink    tab gray    tab olive    tab cyan   which are the Tableau Colors from the    T10    categorical palette  which is the default color cycle     a    CN    color spec  i e   C  followed by a single digit  which is an index into the default property cycle  matplotlib rcParams  axes prop cycle     the indexing occurs at artist creation time and defaults to black if the cycle does not include color          All string specifications of color  other than    CN     are case-insensitive

User · Answer

The easiest thing is probably to provide the color when you create the plot    fig1   plt figure facecolor  1  1  1     or  fig1   ax1  ax2    plt subplots nrows 1  ncols 2  facecolor  1  1  1

User · Answer

simpler answer   ax   plt axes   ax set facecolor  silver

User · Answer

If you already have axes object  just like in Nick T s answer  you can also use   ax patch set facecolor  black

User · Answer

Something like this  Use the axisbg keyword to subplot    gt  gt  gt  from matplotlib figure import Figure  gt  gt  gt  from matplotlib backends backend agg import FigureCanvasAgg as FigureCanvas  gt  gt  gt  figure   Figure    gt  gt  gt  canvas   FigureCanvas figure   gt  gt  gt  axes   figure add subplot 1  1  1  axisbg  red    gt  gt  gt  axes plot  1 2 3     lt matplotlib lines Line2D object at 0x2827e50 gt    gt  gt  gt  canvas print figure  red-bg png      Granted  not a scatter plot  and not a black background

[python] How to change plot background color?

`ax.set_facecolor("red")`

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