Matplotlib 3D Plot Colors Appear Darker Than Normal

I'm using the mpl_toolkits to plot surfaces in 3d using Axes3D and plot_surface. I visualize the output in the following way, You can clearly see that there is a grey tint to the entire surface when the colors are supposed to resemble the colorbar on the right. I see this behavior in several other plots out there doing similar things. For example here https://stackoverflow.com/a/20475233/2495342 I am using the latest anaconda distribution of python and running my code within spyder which uses the Qt4Agg backend. I get the same behavior under linux and windows. Using a different colormap does not help either. The visualization is always tinted grey. I haven't found much help through google, so any help is appreciated. Here is a quick demo ``` import numpy as np from matplotlib import pyplot from matplotlib import cm from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D X, Y = np.meshgrid(np.arange(-1, 1, 0.1), np.arange(-1, 1, 0.1)) Z = np.zeros_like(X) F = np.sqrt(X**2 + Y**2) F -= np.min(F) F /= np.max(F) fig = pyplot.figure() ax = fig.gca(projection='3d') ax.plot_surface(X, Y, Z, rstride=1, cstride=1, facecolors=cm.coolwarm(F)) ``` Which returns