colorspace: A Toolbox for Manipulating and Assessing Colors and Palettes

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.1903.06490
• Publication Date: 2019-01-01
• Authors: Achim Zeileis; Jason C. Fisher; Kurt Hornik; Ross Ihaka; Claire D. McWhite; Paul Murrell; Reto Stauffer; Claus O. Wilke
• Keywords: Toolbox; Color-coding; Statistical graphics; RGB color model; Palette (painting)

The R package colorspace provides a flexible toolbox for selecting individual colors or color palettes, manipulating these colors, and employing them in statistical graphics data visualizations. In particular, the broad range of palettes based on HCL (Hue-Chroma-Luminance) space. three dimensions have been shown to match those human visual system very well, thus facilitating intuitive selection through trajectories this Using model general strategies types are implemented: (1) Qualitative coding categorical information, i.e., where no particular ordering categories is available. (2) Sequential ordered/numeric going from high low (or vice versa). (3) Diverging information around central neutral value, diverge two extremes. To aid application also contains scales use with ggplot2, shiny (and tcltk) apps interactive exploration, visualizations palette properties, accompanying manipulation utilities (like desaturation lighten/darken), emulation vision deficiencies.