How To Manually Specify Colors for Barplot in ggplot2 in R?

In this article, we will discuss how to manually specify colors for Barplot in ggplot2 in R Programming Language.

To specify colors of the bar in Barplot in ggplot2, we use the scale_fill_manual function of the ggplot2 package. Within this function, we need to specify a color for each of the bars as a vector. We can use colors using names as well as hex codes.

Syntax: plot+ scale_fill_manual(values=<color-vector>)

Example 1:

Here, is a basic ggplot2 bar plot with the default colors:

R

# Create sample data
set.seed(5642)
sample_data <- data.frame(name = c("Geek1","Geek2",
                                   "Geek3","Geek4",
                                   "Geeek5") ,
                          value = c(31,12,15,28,45))
# Load ggplot2 package
library("ggplot2")

# Create bar plot with default colors
plot<-ggplot(sample_data,
             aes(name,value, fill=name))
+ geom_bar(stat = "identity")
plot

Output:

To manually specify colors just add scale_fill_manual() function to plot:

R

# Create sample data
set.seed(5642)
sample_data <- data.frame(name = c("Geek1","Geek2",
                                   "Geek3","Geek4",
                                   "Geeek5") ,
                          value = c(31,12,15,28,45))
# Load ggplot2 package
library("ggplot2")

# Create bar plot with default colors
plot<-ggplot(sample_data,
             aes(name,value, fill=name))
+ geom_bar(stat = "identity")

# add scale_fill_manual function to specify colors
plot + scale_fill_manual(values = c("green","yellow",
                                    "red","pink","blue"))

Output:

We can even use hex codes of color instead of names:

R

# Create sample data
set.seed(5642)
sample_data <- data.frame(name = c("Geek1","Geek2",
                                   "Geek3","Geek4",
                                   "Geeek5") ,
                          value = c(31,12,15,28,45))
# Load ggplot2 package
library("ggplot2")

# Create bar plot with default colors
plot<-ggplot(sample_data, aes(name,value, fill=name)) +
geom_bar(stat = "identity")

# add scale_fill_manual function to specify colors
plot + scale_fill_manual(values = c("#207345","#0d576e",
                                    "#610d6e","#6e0d27",
                                    "#6e470d"))

Output: