Question

I would like to apply colormap to an image, and write the resulting image, without using axes, labels, titles, or anything automatically added by matplotlib. Here is what I did:

def make_image(inputname,outputname):
    data = mpimg.imread(inputname)[:,:,0]
    fig = plt.imshow(data)
    fig.set_cmap('hot')
    fig.axes.get_xaxis().set_visible(False)
    fig.axes.get_yaxis().set_visible(False)
    plt.savefig(outputname)

It successfully removes the axis of the figure, but the figure saved, presents a white padding, and a frame around the actual image.

How can I remove them (at least the white padding)?

Answer 1

The axis('off') method resolves one of the problems more succinctly than separately changing each axis and border. It still leaves the white space around the border however. Adding bbox_inches='tight' to the savefig command almost gets you there; you can see in the example below that the white space left is much smaller, but still present.

Newer versions of matplotlib may require bbox_inches=0 instead of the string 'tight' (via @episodeyang and @kadrach)

from numpy import random
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

data = random.random((5,5))
img = plt.imshow(data, interpolation='nearest')
img.set_cmap('hot')
plt.axis('off')
plt.savefig("test.png", bbox_inches='tight')