>>>>> "Peter" == Peter Groszkowski <pgr...@ge...> writes: Peter> Hi: I attach a pcolor plot. I would like to get rid of the Peter> areas outside the larger circle and inside the smaller Peter> circle. Ideally I would like them to be white. Currently I Peter> create my plot using pcolor and then plot *lots* of white Peter> circles (for the inside) and lines (for the outside) on Peter> top, to get rid of the unwanted areas. This works but I Peter> wonder whether there is a better/faster solution. I would Peter> imagine I could set the values corresponding to the Peter> unwanted areas to some particular color before I call Peter> pcolor, but the issue is that I want those ares to be white Peter> (or other color not included in the standard palette which Peter> is used for plotting the area inside the annulus). Can this Peter> be done? Inside the circle is easy - just set the facecolor of the circle to be white 'w', or whatever rgb tuple you want. How are you creating the circles, with plot, scatter, or instantiating your own Circle instances? Outside the circle requires implementing general clipping, which will be done but I can't say how soon right now. What backend are you using? The circles don't look antialiased so I'm guessing not agg. agg and postscript are probably the best bets for getting general clipping support first. Another question: is there a reason you are using pcolor rather than imshow? imshow will give you the same result with interpolation and dramatic performance benefits. Since you aren't using faceted shading or otherwise tweaking the pcolor rectangles, you don't gain anything by using pcolor unless you need a backend that doesn't support imshow yet (gd?) Peter> Another question is in regards to showing tics in pcolor Peter> plots. In my "legend" on the right, I would like them to be Peter> visible, but they get overwritten. I suppose I could plot Peter> each manually after I do pcolor; is it how this is meant to Peter> be done? This is an easy fix. Basically you just need to move the axis drawing to the end of the axes drawing code. Currently it is done before any before any lines or patches are drawn. Try replacing matplotlib.Axes._draw with the code below. I'll make a deal: if you contribute some code to produce the nice color legend you made, I'll try and implement general clipping! JDH def _draw(self, renderer, *args, **kwargs): "Draw everything (plot lines, axes, labels)" if not ( self.xaxis.viewlim.defined() and self.yaxis.viewlim.defined() ): self.update_viewlim() if self.axison: if self._frameon: self._axesPatch.draw(renderer) if self._image is not None: self._image.draw(renderer) for p in self._patches: p.draw(renderer) for line in self._lines: line.draw(renderer) for t in self._text: t.draw(renderer) self._title.draw(renderer) if 0: bbox_artist(self._title, renderer) # optional artists for a in self._artists: a.draw(renderer) if self._legend is not None: self._legend.draw(renderer) for table in self._tables: table.draw(renderer) if self.axison: self.xaxis.draw(renderer) self.yaxis.draw(renderer)