matplotlib

I’m new to Python and Matplotlib, I would like to simply apply colormap to an image and write the resulting image, without using axes, labels, titles or anything usually automatically added by matplotlib. Here is what I did:

I have used spline interpolation to smooth a time series and would also like to add a horizontal line to the plot. But there seems to be an issue that is out of my grips. Any assistance would be really helpful. Here is what I have:

I have a range of points x and y stored in numpy arrays.
Those represent x(t) and y(t) where t=0…T-1

In a matplotlib figure, how can I make the font size for the tick labels using ax1.set_xticklabels() smaller?

I am looking to edit the formatting of the dates on the x-axis. The picture below shows how they appear on my bar graph by default. I would like to remove the repetition of ‘Dec’ and ‘2012’ and just have the actual date numbers along the x-axis.