How can I save a Matplotlib figure after changing the background color?

Using the Spyder IDE, I have created a matplotlib plot and changed the face (background) color of both the figure object and the axes object to black. When I try to save the figure using plt.savefig(...) the axes, title, and axes label are not included.

I have tried implementing the standard advice of adding bbox_inches='tight' to the plt.savefig() function for when the axes are cut off:

plt.savefig("my_fig_name.png", bbox_inches='tight')

To no avail. Others suggested that I change the plotting method to "inline" from "automatic" within either Jupyter Notebook or Spyder. This had no effect. I also tried to make sure there was enough room in the figure for my axes using:

fig.add_axes([0.1,0.1,0.75,0.75])

This does not work either. Below is enough to reproduce my experience.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

xs, ys = [0,1], [0,1]

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(6, 6)) # Adding tight_layout=True has no effect
ax = fig.add_subplot(1, 1, 1)

# When the following block is commented out, the color of the 
# plot is unchanged and the plt.savefig function works perfectly

fig.patch.set_facecolor("#121111")
ax.set_facecolor("#121111")
ax.spines['top'].set_color("#121111")
ax.spines['right'].set_color("#121111")
ax.spines['bottom'].set_color('white')
ax.spines['left'].set_color('white')
ax.xaxis.label.set_color('white')
ax.tick_params(axis='x', colors='white')
ax.yaxis.label.set_color('white')
ax.tick_params(axis='y', colors='white')

ax.set_title("My Graph's Title", color="white")

plt.plot(xs, ys)
plt.xlabel("x-label")
plt.ylabel("y-label")

plt.savefig("my_fig_name.png", bbox_inches="tight")

I am expecting to get an image like this:

What I Expect to Get

However, plt.savefig(...) gives me the following result:

What I Actually Get

Curiously, there seems to be white space around the plot which does not disappear even when I add the tight_layout=True parameter to the matplotlib figure constructor.

fig = plt.figure(figsize=(6, 6), tight_layout=True)

And, when I comment out the code which changes the face color of the plot, the figure is saved correctly with all the axes and labels displayed correctly.

In order to solve your problem, you just have to specify the facecolor keyword argument to your plt.savefig call, in this case :

plt.savefig("my_fig_name.png", bbox_inches="tight", facecolor="#121111")

which gives the intended .png output :

For more information, see plt.savefig documentation.