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It has its issues, but as someone who has used a Lot of MATLAB I will say the built-in colormaps of matplotlib are far superior. For personal stuff it's fine to rely on file exchange colormaps, but I feel less great about using external code in my academic and government work environments.

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My quick and dirty trick is to set an alpha=0.8 to soften the default colors. It always looks better.

Indeed that does make charts look better. I do this for grid line:

ax.set_axisbelow(True) ax.grid(True, alpha=0.3)

I don't mind the default colormap (parula). If I'm using the color for any sort of dimension then I start to care about the colormap choices. Perceptually uniform and colorblind agnostic choices are important for any sort of publication, and arguably a starter for any sort of accessibility considerations.

Take a look at colorcet. https://colorcet.holoviz.org/

The four uniform colormaps that the page references are the value that I'm referring to. Viridis, plasma, inferno, and magma. I don't want a huge selection of colormaps, just a few good ones.

Here is where to get them on the file exchange. This really ought to just be folded into MATLAB proper releases somehow.

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/51986-p...

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