Colors and Color Palettes in R

---

Colors

The command colors() shows 657 built in color names in R.

Here is an website called datalab which shows all the colors sample, name, hex code, rgb code in detail - https://datalab.cc/rcolors

Qualified programming assignment help.

For example let’s create a bar chart -

> x <- c(10,8,6,5,2,1)
> barplot(x)

Using colors name -

> barplot(x, col="cadetblue") 

Using hex code -

> barplot(x, col="#5F9EA0")

Using multiple colors for multiple bars using colors index -

> barplot(x, col=colors()[c(11:16)])

This can also be done using other color calling methods.

---

Color Palettes

Group of colors/Palettes are used in R to make the visualizations more attractive and meaningful. Some of them are discussed here.

---

Built in Color Palettes

Built in color palette in R can be used by palette(). Running it in command will show the colors in it-

> palette()

[1] "black"   "#DF536B" "#61D04F" "#2297E6" "#28E2E5" "#CD0BBC" "#F5C710"
[8] "gray62" 

> barplot(x, col=palette())

Let’s use the built in color palettes in our example -

> par(mfcol = c(3,2))  # to show plots in 2 rows and 3 columns
> barplot(x, col = rainbow(6), xlab="Rainbow colors", sub="rainbow(n)") 
> barplot(x, col = heat.colors(6), xlab="Yellow through red", sub="heat.colors(n)")
> barplot(x, col = terrain.colors(6), xlab="Gray through green(n)", sub="terrain.colors(n)")
> barplot(x, col = topo.colors(6), xlab="Purple through tan", sub="topo.colors(n)")
> barplot(x, col = cm.colors(6), xlab="Pinks and blues", sub="cm.colors(n)")

---

RColorBrewer Color palettes

Install the pacman package using install.packages("pacman") and load RColorBrewer -

> library(pacman)
> library(RColorBrewer)

Display all color palettes with their names -

> display.brewer.all()

Let’s use one of the palettes -

> barplot(x, col = brewer.pal(6,"Set1"))

Sequential Palettes

The palettes are - Blues, BuGn, BuPu, GnBu, Greens, Greys, Oranges, OrRd, PuBu, PuBuGn, PuRd, Purples, RdPu, Reds, YlGn, YlGnBu, YlOrBr, YlOrRd.

> display.brewer.all(type="seq")

To see the BuPu palette with 7 colors -

> display.brewer.pal(7,"BuPu")

Diverging Palettes

The palettes are - BrBG, PiYG, PRGn, PuOr, RdBu, RdGy, RdYlBu, RdYlGn, Spectral.

> display.brewer.all(type="div")

To see the PRGn palette with 7 colors -

> display.brewer.pal(7,"PRGn")

Qualtative Palettes

The palettes are -
Accent (8), Dark2 (8), Paired (12), Pastel1 (9), Pastel2 (8), Set1 (9), Set2 (8), Set3 (12)

> display.brewer.all(type="qual")

To see the Accent palette with 4 colors -

> display.brewer.pal(4,"Accent")

---

Wes Anderson Palettes

Details can be found here - https://github.com/karthik/wesanderson

Let’s load the package for this using p_load() from pacman package and load in the current workspace -

> p_load(wesanderson)
> library(wesanderson)

Let’s see the name of the palettes -

> names(wes_palettes)

 [1] "BottleRocket1"  "BottleRocket2"  "Rushmore1"      "Rushmore"      
 [5] "Royal1"         "Royal2"         "Zissou1"        "Darjeeling1"   
 [9] "Darjeeling2"    "Chevalier1"     "FantasticFox1"  "Moonrise1"     
[13] "Moonrise2"      "Moonrise3"      "Cavalcanti1"    "GrandBudapest1"
[17] "GrandBudapest2" "IsleofDogs1"    "IsleofDogs2"   

Let’s use one of the palettes -

> barplot(x, col= wes_palette("Zissou1"))