Change color of histogram after it was plotted

Question

How can I change the color of a histogram after I draw it? (using hist)

z = hist([1,2,3])
z.set_color(???) < -- Something like this

also how can I check what color is the histogram

z = hist([1,2,3])
color = z.get_color(???) < -- also Something like this

Thank you.

Answer 1

Such functions exist. You just need to store the patches returned by hist and access the facecolor of each of them:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
n, bins, patches = plt.hist([1,2,3])
for p in patches:
    print p.get_facecolor()
    p.set_facecolor((1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0))

Output:

(0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 1.0)
(0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 1.0)
(0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 1.0)
(0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 1.0)
(0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 1.0)
(0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 1.0)
(0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 1.0)
(0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 1.0)
(0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 1.0)
(0.0, 0.5, 0.0, 1.0)

Note that you get one patch per bin. By default hist plots 10 bins. You might want to define it differently using plt.hist([1,2,3], bins=3) .