""" ===================== Histogram as colorbar ===================== This example demonstrates how to use a colored histogram instead of a colorbar to not only show the color-to-value mapping, but also visualize the distribution of values. """ import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np import matplotlib.colors as mcolors # surface data delta = 0.025 x = y = np.arange(-2.0, 2.0, delta) X, Y = np.meshgrid(x, y) Z1 = np.exp(-(((X + 1) * 1.3) ** 2) - ((Y + 1) * 1.3) ** 2) Z2 = 2.5 * np.exp(-((X - 1) ** 2) - (Y - 1) ** 2) Z = Z1**0.25 - Z2**0.5 # colormap & normalization bins = 30 cmap = plt.get_cmap("RdYlBu_r") bin_edges = np.linspace(Z.min(), Z.max(), bins + 1) norm = mcolors.BoundaryNorm(bin_edges, cmap.N) # main plot fig, ax = plt.subplots(layout="constrained") im = ax.imshow(Z, cmap=cmap, origin="lower", extent=[-3, 3, -3, 3], norm=norm) # inset histogram cax = ax.inset_axes([1.18, 0.02, 0.25, 0.95]) # left, bottom, width, height # plot histogram counts, _ = np.histogram(Z, bins=bin_edges) midpoints = (bin_edges[:-1] + bin_edges[1:]) / 2 distance = midpoints[1] - midpoints[0] cax.barh(midpoints, counts, height=0.8 * distance, color=cmap(norm(midpoints))) # styling cax.spines[:].set_visible(False) cax.set_yticks(bin_edges) cax.tick_params(axis="both", which="both", length=0) plt.show()