The colorRamp2 package

The colorRamp2() function can generate a color mapping function from a vector of break values and a vector of corresponding colors. Other colors are linearly interpolated in a certain color space.

library(colorRamp2)

col_fun = colorRamp2(c(0, 0.5, 1), c("blue", "white", "red"))
col_fun(seq(0, 1, length = 20))

##  [1] "#0000FFFF" "#522CFFFF" "#7448FFFF" "#8E61FFFF" "#A479FFFF" "#B891FFFF"
##  [7] "#C9A9FFFF" "#DAC1FFFF" "#E9DAFFFF" "#F8F3FFFF" "#FFF5F1FF" "#FFE1D6FF"
## [13] "#FFCDBBFF" "#FFB8A1FF" "#FFA388FF" "#FF8E6EFF" "#FF7756FF" "#FF5E3DFF"
## [19] "#FF3F23FF" "#FF0000FF"

plot(NULL, xlim = c(0, 1), ylim = c(0, 1))
x = seq(0, 1, length = 20)
y = rep(0.5, 20)
points(x, y, pch = 16, col = col_fun(x), cex = 2)

With the color mapping function col_fun, colors can be mapped back to the original numeric values. Note since colors are discrete, the values that are mapped back are not exactly identical to their original values.

x1 = runif(10)
col = col_fun(x1)
x2 = col2value(col, col_fun = col_fun)
x1

##  [1] 0.98396297 0.60107231 0.48246245 0.62357646 0.26222607 0.16089092
##  [7] 0.32467406 0.01709139 0.41869193 0.62266101

x2

##  [1] 0.98302000 0.59089422 0.48379767 0.61179922 0.26649968 0.16305249
##  [7] 0.32752657 0.01732671 0.42131119 0.61077500

sessionInfo()

## R version 4.6.1 (2026-06-24)
## Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
## Running under: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS
## 
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS:   /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libblas.so.3 
## LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libopenblasp-r0.3.32.so;  LAPACK version 3.12.0
## 
## locale:
##  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C              
##  [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_US.UTF-8    
##  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8   
##  [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NAME=C                 
##  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C            
## [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       
## 
## time zone: Etc/UTC
## tzcode source: system (glibc)
## 
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     
## 
## other attached packages:
## [1] colorRamp2_0.0.1 rmarkdown_2.31  
## 
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
##  [1] digest_0.6.39    R6_2.6.1         fastmap_1.2.0    xfun_0.60       
##  [5] maketools_1.3.2  cachem_1.1.0     knitr_1.51       htmltools_0.5.9 
##  [9] buildtools_1.0.0 lifecycle_1.0.5  cli_3.6.6        sass_0.4.10     
## [13] jquerylib_0.1.4  compiler_4.6.1   sys_3.4.3        tools_4.6.1     
## [17] evaluate_1.0.5   bslib_0.11.0     colorspace_2.1-3 yaml_2.3.12     
## [21] jsonlite_2.0.0   rlang_1.3.0