mathplotlib imshow complex 2D array

Question

Is there any good way how to plot 2D array of complex numbers as image in mathplotlib ?

It makes very much sense to map magnitude of complex number as "brightness" or "saturation" and phase as "Hue" ( anyway Hue is nothing else than phase in RBG color space). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSL_and_HSV

But as far as I know imshow does accept only scalar values which are then mapped using some colorscale. There is nothing like ploting real RGB pictures?

I thing it would be easy just implement a version which accepts 2D array of tuples (vectors) of 3 floating point numbers or ndarray of floats of shape [:,:,3]. I guess this would be generally usefful feature. It would be also usefull for plotting real RGB colord images, such as textures outputted from OpenCL

Answer 1

this does almost the same of @Hooked code but very much faster.

import numpy as np
from numpy import pi
import pylab as plt
from colorsys import hls_to_rgb

def colorize(z):
    r = np.abs(z)
    arg = np.angle(z) 

    h = (arg + pi)  / (2 * pi) + 0.5
    l = 1.0 - 1.0/(1.0 + r**0.3)
    s = 0.8

    c = np.vectorize(hls_to_rgb) (h,l,s) # --> tuple
    c = np.array(c)  # -->  array of (3,n,m) shape, but need (n,m,3)
    c = c.swapaxes(0,2) 
    return c

N=1000
x,y = np.ogrid[-5:5:N*1j, -5:5:N*1j]
z = x + 1j*y

w = 1/(z+1j)**2 + 1/(z-2)**2
img = colorize(w)
plt.imshow(img)
plt.show()