mancala

A command-line tool for visualizing color maps in a uniform color space.

mancala viridis

By default, color maps are transformed into Oklab space. mancala uses colour to perform the color model transformations. The CLI is constructed using the Typer library.

Installation

Make sure to install this package with Python 3.11 or 3.12.

Using pipx (recommended for CLI only)

pipx installs the package into an isolated environment, only exposing the project scripts (if added to PATH).

pipx install git+https://github.com/ilikecubesnstuff/mancala

Using pip

pip install git+https://github.com/ilikecubesnstuff/mancala

CLI Usage

Depending on your installation method, you can use mancala by either doing mancala or python -m mancala on the command line.

The arguments are color map names as recognized by Matplotlib (including those from CMasher). To visualize a particular axis of lightness, chroma, or hue, the optional flags -l, -c, and -h can be used respectively. If none are provided, the default is to display a 3D plot with all three (-lch). To use a different color model, the optional --model flag can be used to specify any of the color models available in the colour library.

mancala viridis -ch --model CAM16UCS

Custom Color Maps

To plot a custom color map, the mancala.visualize module contains all the relevant plotting methods for any combination of lightness, chroma, and hue.

A color map is a function that takes one argument (a value between 0 and 1) and returns a corresponding RGB color. This output color is interpreted as belonging in the sRGB color space.

import numpy as np

def custom_cmap(q):
    return np.array([q, q**2 * 2/3 + 1/6, abs(q - 0.5) + 1/3]).T

This color map can then be visualized with mancala:

from mancala.visualize import plot_LCH
plot_LCH(custom_cmap)