Hi guys, I wrote a new module (in branch yt of hg) that will do simple image writing; it only depends on libpng (no matplotlib dependencies) and does not do anything fancy: no text, no callbacks, no colormaps. But, it's really quite fast and it comes with a couple colormaps -- algae, jet, gist_stern and hot. The API is pretty easy. You can either call: import yt.extensions.image_writer as iw iw.write_image(image, filename, color_bounds = None, cmap = "algae") where image is a numpy array of values to be colormapped, or you can directly call the image writer: yt.amr_utils.write_png(some_image_data, filename) where some_image_data is uint8 and is (N,M,4). Unfortunately, generating FixedResolutionBuffers still requires that matplotlib be imported; I'll work on getting around this sometime, because if this ends up working we should be able to run on Kraken in the compute nodes without importing matplotlib. Although, Cray has now announced they're going to support dynamically linked libraries on their compute nodes, so maybe we won't need this for long. That being said, it should also be pretty handy for things like writing out volume renderings and anywhere else we previously used pylab to save images rather than plots. Let me know if you have any ideas or problems! -Matt