Manually set color of points in legend

Gabriel picture Gabriel · May 16, 2014 · Viewed 35.4k times · Source

I'm making a scatter plot which looks like this:

enter image description here

(MWE at bottom of question)

As can be seen in the image above the colors of the points in the legend are set to blue automatically by matplotlib. I need to set this points to some other color not present in the colormap (ie: black) so they won't generate confusion with the colors associated with said colormap.

I looked around but the matplotlib.legend module does not seem to accept a color keyword. Is there any way to do this?


Here's the MWE:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

def rand_data():
    return np.random.uniform(low=0., high=1., size=(100,))

# Generate data.
x, y, x2, x3 = [rand_data() for i in range(4)]
# This data defines the markes and labels used.
x1 = np.random.random_integers(7, 9, size=(100,))

# Order all lists so smaller points are on top.
order = np.argsort(-np.array(x2))
# Order x and y.
x_o, y_o = np.take(x, order), np.take(y, order)
# Order list related to markers and labels.
z1 = np.take(x1, order)
# Order list related to sizes.
z2 = np.take(x2, order)
# Order list related to colors.
z3 = np.take(x3, order)

plt.figure()
cm = plt.cm.get_cmap('RdYlBu')

# Scatter plot where each value in z1 has a different marker and label
# assigned.
mrk = {7: ('o', '7'), 8: ('s', '8'), 9: ('D', '9')}
for key, value in mrk.items():

    s1 = (z1 == key)
    plt.scatter(x_o[s1], y_o[s1], marker=value[0], label=value[1],
        s=z2[s1] * 100., c=z3[s1], cmap=cm, lw=0.2)

# Plot colorbar
plt.colorbar()

# Plot legend.
plt.legend(loc="lower left", markerscale=0.7, scatterpoints=1, fontsize=10)

plt.show()

Answer

Saullo G. P. Castro picture Saullo G. P. Castro · May 16, 2014

You can obtain the legend handles and change their colors doing:

ax = plt.gca()
leg = ax.get_legend()
leg.legendHandles[0].set_color('red')
leg.legendHandles[1].set_color('yellow')