Is It Possible To Do Additive Blending With Matplotlib?

When dealing with overlapping high density scatter or line plots of different colors it can be convenient to implement additive blending schemes, where the RGB colors of each marke

Solution 1:

If you only need an image as the result, you can get the canvas buffer as a numpy array, and then do the blending, here is an example:

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.scatter(x1,y1,c='b',edgecolors='none')
ax.set_xlim(-4, 4)
ax.set_ylim(-4, 4)
ax.patch.set_facecolor("none")
ax.patch.set_edgecolor("none")
fig.canvas.draw()

w, h = fig.canvas.get_width_height()
img = np.frombuffer(fig.canvas.buffer_rgba(), np.uint8).reshape(h, w, -1).copy()

ax.clear()
ax.scatter(x2,y2,c='r',edgecolors='none')
ax.set_xlim(-4, 4)
ax.set_ylim(-4, 4)
ax.patch.set_facecolor("none")
ax.patch.set_edgecolor("none")
fig.canvas.draw()

img2 = np.frombuffer(fig.canvas.buffer_rgba(), np.uint8).reshape(h, w, -1).copy()

img[img[:, :, -1] == 0] = 0
img2[img2[:, :, -1] == 0] = 0

fig.clf()

plt.imshow(np.maximum(img, img2))
plt.subplots_adjust(0, 0, 1, 1)
plt.axis("off")
plt.show()

the result:

Solution 2:

This feature is now supported by my matplotlib backend https://github.com/anntzer/mplcairo (master only):

import matplotlib; matplotlib.use("module://mplcairo.qt")
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from mplcairo import operator_t
import numpy as np

x1 = np.random.randn(1000)
y1 = np.random.randn(1000)
x2 = np.random.randn(1000) * 5
y2 = np.random.randn(1000)
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
# The figure and axes background must be made transparent.
fig.patch.set(alpha=0)
ax.patch.set(alpha=0)
pc1 = ax.scatter(x1, y1, c='b', edgecolors='none')
pc2 = ax.scatter(x2, y2, c='r', edgecolors='none')
operator_t.ADD.patch_artist(pc2)  # Use additive blending.
plt.show()