how to carryon after matplotlib has been called

What you’re running into is Matplotlib’s event loop behavior.
Nothing is “stuck” logically — plt.show() is blocking by default.

Why your code stops at plt.show()

In a normal Python script (not a Jupyter notebook):

plt.show()

Blocks execution until all figure windows are closed.

So what actually happens is:

The image window opens

Python waits there

Your remaining OpenCV + Matplotlib code will not run

Only after you close the window does execution continue

This is expected behavior.

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Correct mental model

plt.show() = “Start GUI loop and wait until user closes the figure(s)”

This is different from cv2.imshow(), which continues after cv2.waitKey()

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Best solutions (pick one)

Solution 1: Call plt.show() only once (recommended)

Matplotlib is designed to show all figures at the end.

plt.figure(figsize=[10, 10]) plt.title("Image") plt.axis("off") plt.imshow(image[:, :, ::-1]) # ---- processing continues ---- plt.figure(figsize=[30, 30]) plt.subplot(131) plt.imshow(image_sharp[:, :, ::-1]) plt.title("Final Image") plt.axis("off") plt.subplot(132) plt.imshow(image_cleared[:, :, ::-1]) plt.title("Clear Impurities") plt.axis("off") plt.subplot(133) plt.imshow(image[:, :, ::-1]) plt.title("Original") plt.axis("off") plt.show() # <-- only here

✔ Clean
✔ Idiomatic Matplotlib
✔ No blocking surprises

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Solution 2: Non-blocking show

If you must show something mid-script:

plt.show(block=False) plt.pause(0.001) # allow GUI event loop to update

Example:

plt.imshow(image[:, :, ::-1]) plt.axis("off") plt.show(block=False) plt.pause(0.5) # show for half a second

Solution 3: Interactive mode

Enable interactive plotting:

plt.ion()

Then plt.show() becomes non-blocking:

plt.ion() plt.imshow(image[:, :, ::-1]) plt.show() # code continues immediately

To disable later:

plt.ioff() plt.show()

Useful for debugging or step-by-step visualization.

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Solution 4: Save instead of display (best for pipelines)

For scripts or batch processing:

plt.imshow(image[:, :, ::-1]) plt.axis("off") plt.savefig("step1.png", bbox_inches="tight") plt.close()

No GUI
No blocking
Fully automated