how do i get the color gray

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lowcalorie
lowcalorie on 23 May 2012
Commented: Steven Lord on 23 Jan 2024
how do i get the color gray on my graph

Accepted Answer

Hans Scharler
Hans Scharler on 13 May 2022
Edited: Hans Scharler on 23 Jan 2024
As others have pointed out, gray is the result of the Red, Green, and Blue values being equal somewhere between 0 and 1 where black is [0 0 0] and white is [1 1 1].
x = rand(200,4);
y = rand(200,4);
grayColor = [.7 .7 .7];
plot(x, y, 'Color', grayColor)
If you are you used to 255 color values from HTML for example, you can divide by 255 to get a value between 0 and 1. Classic HTML gray is [128, 128, 128].
x = rand(200,4);
y = rand(200,4);
htmlGray = [128 128 128]/255;
plot(x, y, 'Color', htmlGray)
  1 Comment
Steven Lord
Steven Lord on 23 Jan 2024
And if you want to select a particular color interactively then hard-code that color value into your app, open the uisetcolor dialog box. Select the shade that matches what you want from the dialog then close the dialog. The color value will be displayed in the Command Window, ready for you to copy and paste into the app.

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More Answers (1)

Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 23 May 2012
Gray is any RGB color with Red, Green, and Blue components all equal, excepting black (all 0's) and white (all components the maximum).
For example,
plot(x, y, 'Color', [17 17 17])
  4 Comments
Zhe Chen
Zhe Chen on 28 Jul 2020
must be in the range (0 1)
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 28 Jul 2020
Which MATLAB release are you using?
plot(rand(1,5), 'Color', uint8([17 17 17]))
hold on
plot(rand(1,5), 'Color', [17 17 17]/255)
hold off
works for me.
Note that there are some plot attributes that only accept floating point, such as most Alpha values. In that case you would need the /255 form.

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