Transform only one axis to log10 scale with ggplot2

The simplest is to just give the 'trans' (formerly 'formatter') argument of either the scale_x_continuous or the scale_y_continuous the name of the desired log function:

library(ggplot2)  # which formerly required pkg:plyr
m + geom_boxplot() + scale_y_continuous(trans='log10')

EDIT: Or if you don't like that, then either of these appears to give different but useful results:

m <- ggplot(diamonds, aes(y = price, x = color), log="y")
m + geom_boxplot() 
m <- ggplot(diamonds, aes(y = price, x = color), log10="y")
m + geom_boxplot()

EDIT2 & 3: Further experiments (after discarding the one that attempted successfully to put "$" signs in front of logged values):

# Need a function that accepts an x argument
# wrap desired formatting around numeric result
fmtExpLg10 <- function(x) paste(plyr::round_any(10^x/1000, 0.01) , "K $", sep="")

ggplot(diamonds, aes(color, log10(price))) + 
  geom_boxplot() + 
  scale_y_continuous("Price, log10-scaling", trans = fmtExpLg10)

Note added mid 2017 in comment about package syntax change:

scale_y_continuous(formatter = 'log10') is now scale_y_continuous(trans = 'log10') (ggplot2 v2.2.1)

I had a similar problem and this scale worked for me like a charm:

breaks = 10**(1:10)
scale_y_log10(breaks = breaks, labels = comma(breaks))

as you want the intermediate levels, too (10^3.5), you need to tweak the formatting:

breaks = 10**(1:10 * 0.5)
m <- ggplot(diamonds, aes(y = price, x = color)) + geom_boxplot()
m + scale_y_log10(breaks = breaks, labels = comma(breaks, digits = 1))

After executing::