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Sequential, diverging and qualitative colour scales from colorbrewer.org

Source: R/scale-brewer.r, R/uu_zxx.r
scale_brewer.Rd

ColorBrewer provides sequential, diverging and qualitative colour schemes which are particularly suited and tested to display discrete values (levels of a factor) on a map. ggplot2 can use those colours in discrete scales. It also allows to smoothly interpolate 6 colours from any palette to a continuous scale (6 colours per palette gives nice gradients; more results in more saturated colours which do not look as good). However, the original colour schemes (particularly the qualitative ones) were not intended for this and the perceptual result is left to the appreciation of the user. See https://colorbrewer2.org for more information.

Usage

scale_colour_brewer(..., type = "seq", palette = 1, direction = 1)

scale_fill_brewer(..., type = "seq", palette = 1, direction = 1)

scale_colour_distiller(
  ...,
  type = "seq",
  palette = 1,
  direction = -1,
  values = NULL,
  space = "Lab",
  na.value = "grey50",
  guide = "colourbar"
)

scale_fill_distiller(
  ...,
  type = "seq",
  palette = 1,
  direction = -1,
  values = NULL,
  space = "Lab",
  na.value = "grey50",
  guide = "colourbar"
)

Arguments

...

Other arguments passed on to discrete_scale to control name, limits, breaks, labels and so forth.

type

One of "seq" (sequential), "div" (diverging) or "qual" (qualitative)

palette

If a string, will use that named palette. If a number, will index into the list of palettes of appropriate type

direction

Sets the order of colours in the scale. If 1, the default, colours are as output by RColorBrewer::brewer.pal(). If -1, the order of colours is reversed.

values

if colours should not be evenly positioned along the gradient this vector gives the position (between 0 and 1) for each colour in the colours vector. See rescale() for a convenience function to map an arbitrary range to between 0 and 1.

space

colour space in which to calculate gradient. Must be "Lab" - other values are deprecated.

na.value

Colour to use for missing values

guide

Type of legend. Use "colourbar" for continuous colour bar, or "legend" for discrete colour legend.

Palettes

The following palettes are available for use with these scales:

Diverging

BrBG, PiYG, PRGn, PuOr, RdBu, RdGy, RdYlBu, RdYlGn, Spectral

Qualitative

Accent, Dark2, Paired, Pastel1, Pastel2, Set1, Set2, Set3

Sequential

Blues, BuGn, BuPu, GnBu, Greens, Greys, Oranges, OrRd, PuBu, PuBuGn, PuRd, Purples, RdPu, Reds, YlGn, YlGnBu, YlOrBr, YlOrRd

See also

Other colour scales: scale_colour_gradient, scale_colour_grey, scale_colour_hue

Examples

dsamp <- diamonds[sample(nrow(diamonds), 1000), ]
(d <- ggplot(dsamp, aes(carat, price)) +
  geom_point(aes(colour = clarity)))


# Change scale label
d + scale_colour_brewer()

d + scale_colour_brewer("Diamond\nclarity")


# Select brewer palette to use, see ?scales::brewer_pal for more details
d + scale_colour_brewer(palette = "Greens")

d + scale_colour_brewer(palette = "Set1")


# \donttest{
# scale_fill_brewer works just the same as
# scale_colour_brewer but for fill colours
p <- ggplot(diamonds, aes(x = price, fill = cut)) +
  geom_histogram(position = "dodge", binwidth = 1000)
p + scale_fill_brewer()

# the order of colour can be reversed
p + scale_fill_brewer(direction = -1)

# the brewer scales look better on a darker background
p + scale_fill_brewer(direction = -1) + theme_dark()

# }

# Use distiller variant with continous data
v <- ggplot(faithfuld) +
  geom_tile(aes(waiting, eruptions, fill = density))
v

v + scale_fill_distiller()

v + scale_fill_distiller(palette = "Spectral")