I was trying the above trick to change the transparency of contour lines and wondering why not all the lines have changed — then I found your post. Thanks and your post saved me.

An update/correction after some additional exploration: EdgePrims is still used for contour lines that do not form closed loops, as is the case when a contour line intersects the edge of the dataset. Therefore, in order to set the properties of all contours consistently, you must loop over all EdgePrims and EdgeLoopPrims.

@Chunyu – when you save the figure, many of the undocumented customizations are reset by Matlab.

If you are saving into a *.fig file format, then you can add your customizations to the figure’s CreateFcn callback (see here and here).

If you are saving to EPS, PDF or some image format then try using the export_fig or ScreenCapture utilities.

Thank you very much for sharing all this. I may have still a related problem I hope you could help me solve…

I have a mountain-like 3D surface plot and a value as a treshold. When I cut the 3D plot a the treshold level using contourf, it plots separeted surfaces.
For illustration, here is a simple example:

z = peaks(20);
z = z/max(z(:));
[c,h] = contourf(z,[0.4 1]);

gives a figure with 3 delimited areas. I would like to display these areas in different colors, say yellow, green and blue. This seemed possible in the previous versions of matlab using, h.Children, but I can’t see how I could obtain the same result now that internal patches are not defined anymore. Do you perhaps know the answer ?

I am sorry if this is trivial with all the pieces of information you shared already, I am a bit new to matlab and still could not figure this thing out.

Thanks in advance !

@Diaa – as the post explains, you have direct access to all the separate contour labels and lines – you can hide/delete those lines and labels which your program’s logic decides should not be displayed.

Thanks for sharing this useful piece of information.

However, if I have a filled-contour plot and I would like to hide certain level of some value. For example, to hide levels of temperature equal to or greater than some upper limit for better demonstration. How can I do that ?

Many thanks

Thanks – I completely forgot about this alternative. There are many ways to skin a cat…