Wow, with all the tecnological advancements in photography and graphics software, it's so easy to take a digital picture of your house, inside or out, load it into a special software program on your computer, select from a variety of paint colors, and voila, you can instantly see how it would look. If the color is not quite what you envisioned, then change the color and try again.
That's how I selected the paint color of our family room, and surprisingly the color I picked was not one I had even considered to begin with, and now we are all very pleased with the results. With the aid of a free software program called CBN Selector 2 (Color By Number) I was able to take a picture of the room with our digital camera, save it to the hard drive and then load it into the CBN software where I could play with it, coloring all walls or just one without colorizing the pictures on the wall, furniture or other accessories, and getting a true to life visualization.
When I say that you can "instantly see" the newly colorized image, that happens after spending a bit of time specifying the areas on the photo that you want to colorize. Once that's done, you can apply a color and keep changing it until you find the right color. The color selections include many reknowned paint manufacturers, such as Benjamin Moore, Debbie Travis's Collection, etc., who provide their colors as found on the paint chip samples you see in the stores. Or you can select any color from the color wheel, a favourite fabric or household knick knack, and take the color code to the store to get it custom made.
However, due to the limitations of your monitor's color palette and graphic card capabilities, what you see may not necessarily be what you get! Sometimes the color just can't be made. Sometimes the actual color chip sample displays differently on your screen. The trick is to getting it right is to use both computer and actual color paint chip samples to make sure you do get what you see. Saving the colorized pictures is also a good idea so you can compare and confirm your color choices later, and of course show them off, I mean to, your family & friends for a second opinion.
When I started, I originally was going to paint a blue color. We have a nice butter yellow couch & love seat, and a deep blue chair. The fireplace had reddish brick and a wood mantle. The blue didn't look as nice as I first thought it would. Then I tried greens, yellows and browns. Finally I selected quite a dark & rich red by accident from the color wheel and it really made the room pop so we decided that was it. But when I tried to get the color code to take to the store, it could not find one. I applied a variety of premade reds to find something close but nothing seemed to be quite right.
I went to the paint store and brought home a handful of red paint chip samples. Some where vibrant red, some where dark, all ranging in pink to orange and brown hues. I held them up the the computer screen, tilted the monitor to get a better light and other tactics to compare to the color with the picture on screen. In frustration, I selected the Hockey jersey colors list and, well living in Vancouver, selected the Canucks Red and it really matched the one I got from the color wheel...what luck. When I asked for the color code, it gave me Drum Beat Red as the closest premade match. That name rang a bell and I quickly scanned through the color chips and there it was! It was actually quite dark and I was a bit skeptical but it did look nice on the colorized computer image so we went with it and it turned out beautifully.
If all that probably sounded like a bit of a hassle, the alternative would have been a blue room that I ended up not liking, or it wouldn't be done while I was still trying to make up my mind...maybe this color, maybe that,...arrgh. Instead it's done, and now I'm planning the color(s) to paint the exterior of my house!
You can download the CBN Paint Selector program for free from Mills Paint. Take the time to go through the tutorial as it quickly explains the steps in creating areas to colorize on the image, selecting the paint colors, and some other helpful hints. It's actually quite easy to use as well as being quite user friendly.
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