I was wondering: I have a 1 row, 4 column plot. However, the first three subplots share the same yaxes extent (i.e. they have the same range and represent the same thing). The forth does not.

What I want to do is change the wspace of the three first plots so they are touching (and are grouped), and then the forth plot is space out a bit with no overlap of yaxis label, etc.

I could do this so simply with a little photoshop editing...but I would like to have a coded version. How could I do this?

What you most probably want is GridSpec. It gives you the liberty to adjust the wspace for subplot groups.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.gridspec as gridspec
import numpy as npfig = plt.figure()
# create a 1-row 3-column container as the left container
gs_left = gridspec.GridSpec(1, 3)# create a 1-row 1-column grid as the right container
gs_right = gridspec.GridSpec(1, 1)# add plots to the nested structure
ax1 = fig.add_subplot(gs_left[0,0])
ax2 = fig.add_subplot(gs_left[0,1])
ax3 = fig.add_subplot(gs_left[0,2])# create a 
ax4 = fig.add_subplot(gs_right[0,0])# now the plots are on top of each other, we'll have to adjust their edges so that they won't overlap
gs_left.update(right=0.65)
gs_right.update(left=0.7)# also, we want to get rid of the horizontal spacing in the left gridspec
gs_left.update(wspace=0)

Now we get:

Of course, you'll want to do something with the labels, etc., but now you have the adjustable spacing.

GridSpec can be used to produce some quite complicated layouts. Have a look at:

http://matplotlib.org/users/gridspec.html