Plot any RGB image as as pcolormesh in matplotlib's pcolormesh

plot_rgb_as_pcolormesh

import numpy as np

def plot_as_colormesh(image, axes, **pcolormeshkwargs):
    raveled_pixel_shape = (image.shape[0]*image.shape[1], image.shape[2])
    color_tuple = image.transpose((1,0,2)).reshape(raveled_pixel_shape)

    if color_tuple.dtype == np.uint8:
        color_tuple = color_tuple / 255.

    index = np.tile(np.arange(image.shape[0]), (image.shape[1],1))
    quad = axes.pcolormesh(index, color=color_tuple, linewidth=0, **pcolormeshkwargs)
    quad.set_array(None)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    import urllib2
    import cv2
    from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

    sample_image = urllib2.urlopen('http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/grownups.png').read()
    sample_image = np.fromstring(sample_image, np.uint8)
    sample_image = cv2.imdecode(sample_image, cv2.CV_LOAD_IMAGE_COLOR)
    sample_image = cv2.cvtColor(sample_image, cv2.COLOR_BGR2RGB)
    sample_image = cv2.transpose(sample_image)[:,::-1]

    axes = plt.axes()
    plot_as_colormesh(sample_image, axes)
    plt.show()

This is probably not a good way to plot your high-res holiday pictures, but if you have some sort of bitmap-like figure in which you want to control colors precisely, this lets you generate a scalable plot (and save it e.g. as svg/pdf).