Scipy provides a command (imsave) to make a raster (png, jpg...) image from a 2D array, each pixel corresponding to one value of the array. Yet the image is black and white.
Here is a recipy to do this with Matplotlib, and use a colormap to give color to the image.
1 from pylab import *
2 from scipy import mgrid
3
4 def imsave(filename, X, **kwargs):
5 """ Homebrewed imsave to have nice colors... """
6 figsize=(array(X.shape)/100.0)[::-1]
7 rcParams.update({'figure.figsize':figsize})
8 fig = figure(figsize=figsize)
9 axes([0,0,1,1]) # Make the plot occupy the whole canvas
10 axis('off')
11 fig.set_size_inches(figsize)
12 imshow(X,origin='lower', **kwargs)
13 savefig(filename, facecolor='black', edgecolor='black', dpi=100)
14 close(fig)
15
16
17 X,Y=mgrid[-5:5:0.1,-5:5:0.1]
18 Z=sin(X**2+Y**2+1e-4)/(X**2+Y**2+1e-4) # Create the data to be plotted
19 imsave('imsave.png', Z, cmap=cm.hot )
