Scientific notation colorbar
You could use colorbar‘s format parameter: import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np import matplotlib.ticker as ticker img = np.random.randn(300,300) myplot = plt.imshow(img) def fmt(x, pos): a, b = ‘{:.2e}’.format(x).split(‘e’) b = int(b) return r’${} \times 10^{{{}}}$’.format(a, b) plt.colorbar(myplot, format=ticker.FuncFormatter(fmt)) plt.show()