overlay bar plot without mixing color

I would like to create a bar plot with overlaying bars of different colours.

I tried using FaceAlpha but this alters the colours.

Basically, I would like my plot to look like a stacked bar colour wise, but like an ovelayed bar in terms of the values.

This is the simplified code and result of what I have tried:

A = [1;5;3;7;4];
B = [3;2;4;8;2];
figure;
bar(A, 'FaceColor', 'b', 'FaceAlpha',0.5)
hold on
bar(B, 'FaceColor', 'y', 'FaceAlpha',0.5)
hold off

How can I overlay my bars in a way that they show the colour I defined instead of mixing them to this weird muddy green in the overlaying bits?

Answer 1

[Rik]

Here is my solution, which allows you to specify the 3 face colors separately:

A = [1;5;3;7;4];
B = [3;2;4;8;2];
shared=min(A,B);
A_high=max(0,A-shared);
B_high=max(0,B-shared);
data=[shared A_high B_high];
h=bar(data,'stacked');
h(1).FaceColor='g';
h(2).FaceColor='b';
h(3).FaceColor='y';

[piepsi]

Thank you for your reply! This is not quite what I am looking for though. Rather than adding a third colour for the overlapping bits, I would just like the values in A to be blue and those in B to be yellow. So at x axis =1 the green should be blue, at x=2 it should be yellow and so on

[Rik]

I think need to add another column in data to do that. The idea would be the same in principle, but you would set one column to 0 if A is larger than B and the other to 0 if B is larger than A.

Why don't you have a try first?

And what should happen if A has the same value as B?

[piepsi]

I figured it out! Thank you for your help.

Here's the code for anyone having a similar problem:

A = [1;5;3;7;4];
B = [3;2;4;8;2];
shared = min(A,B);
A_high = max(0,A-shared);
B_high = max(0,B-shared);
A_low_idx = find(A<B);
B_low_idx = find(A>B);
A_idx_low = [A_low_idx(:); B_low_idx(:)];
B_idx_low = [B_low_idx(:); A_low_idx(:)];
zero = zeros(numel(A));
A_low = [A(A_low_idx); zero(B_low_idx)]; 
B_low = [B(B_low_idx); zero(A_low_idx)];
[A_idx_low, A_ids_low] = sort(A_idx_low); 
[B_idx_low, B_ids_low] = sort(B_idx_low); 
A_low = A_low(A_ids_low);
B_low = B_low(B_ids_low);
data = [A_low B_low A_high B_high];
h = bar(data,'stacked');
h(1).FaceColor = 'b';
h(2).FaceColor = 'y';
h(3).FaceColor = 'b';
h(4).FaceColor = 'y';