Extract Default Color Palette of ggplot2 R Package (Example)
This tutorial shows how to emulate the ggplot2 default color palette in the R programming language.
The content of the page looks as follows:
- Creation of Example Data
- Example: Extract Default Color Palette of ggplot2
- Video & Further Resources
If you want to learn more about these contents, keep reading.
Creation of Example Data
Let’s create some example data and a ggplot2 plot in order to illustrate how to identify the default color palette of the ggplot2 package.
First, we need to create an exemplifying data frame:
data <- data.frame(group = LETTERS[1:4], # Create example data prob = c(2, 1, 5, 3))
Furthermore, we need to install and load the ggplot2 package to R:
install.packages("ggplot2") # Install ggplot2 R package library("ggplot2") # Load ggplot2 R package
Now, we can create a barchart of our example data based on the ggplot2 package as follows:
ggplot(data, aes(x = group, y = prob, fill = group)) + # Create ggplot2 barchart geom_bar(stat = "identity")
Figure 1: Basic Barchart Created with the ggplot2 R Package.
Figure 1 illustrates our example barchart. As you can see, the barchart contains four bars, each with a different color.
In the following example, I’ll show you how to identify the hex codes of these colors in R. So keep on reading!
Example: Extract Default Color Palette of ggplot2
An easy way to extract the default colors of the ggplot2 package is provided by the scales R package. Let’s install and load the package:
install.packages("scales") # Install scales R package library("scales") # Load scales R package
Now, we can use the following R code to get the hex codes of our previous ggplot2 barplot:
n1 <- nrow(data) # Amount of default colors hex_codes1 <- hue_pal()(n1) # Identify hex codes hex_codes1 # Print hex codes to console # "#F8766D" "#7CAE00" "#00BFC4" "#C77CFF"
As you can see based on the previous output of the RStudio console, we saved the hex codes in the data object hex_codes1.
The scales package also provides a nice way to visualize the colors:
show_col(hex_codes1) # Plot hex codes/colors
Figure 2: Four Default Colors & Hex Codes of the ggplot2 Color Palette.
Figure 2 shows the default colors of the ggplot2 package and the hex codes in a nice graph.
Of cause, we could do the same procedure for ggplots with a different amount of colors. For instance, we could get the first 50 default colors as shown below:
n2 <- 50 # Higher amount of hex colors hex_codes2 <- hue_pal()(n2) # Identify hex codes show_col(hex_codes2) # Plot hex codes/colors
Figure 3: Fifty Default Colors & Hex Codes of the ggplot2 Color Palette.
Video & Further Resources
Have a look at the following video of my YouTube channel. I illustrate the R codes of this tutorial in the video:
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Furthermore, you could have a look at the other articles of this website.
- Assign Fixed Colors to Categorical Variable in ggplot2 Plot
- R Graphics Gallery
- The R Programming Language
Summary: On this page, I explained how to return the default ggplot2 colors based on the scales package in R programming. If you have any further questions, let me know in the comments section.
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