Sherwin Williams Paint Visualizer
We’ve been thinking about colors for our living room. We just painted an early American-style brown color in the dining room, and we’d like to find a lighter, complementary color for the living room. I’m no good with color selection, and Kim is knee-deep writing her term paper, so I immediately looked for an online tool to help. I ran across Sherman Williams’ Color Visualizer.
The tool requires you to select from a number of pre-canned rooms. The idea is to pick the room that reminds you most of the room you’re trying to work on. Once you have the room selected, you can “try” different primary paint colors on the walls, and the tool will show you complementary colors that will go well with your selection. It also offers a nice save and reload feature.
I picked a whacky combination in the room above to show the flexibility of the tool. Notice in the lower left how the tool will show you the colors that best go with the paint color you’ve picked. This is particularly helpful for me.
I noticed that Behr also has a tool available on their site but I have yet to explore it. It looks like Behr’s version will allow you to upload a picture of your room and paint it, but they charge $4.95/year for this functionality. I find it hard to understand why Behr would charge a nominal fee for this tool. Aren’t they likely to recover their investment in paint they sell to folks “painting” their rooms with the tool? The cost seems like a big deterrant, if for no other reason than the hassle of payment.
What do you think? Do you use a tool to help pick paints? Do you have any experience with a vendor other than Sherwin-Williams?
February 28th, 2008 at 5:34 pm
Hey - if you like that idea - try out this tool by ColorCharts.org.
http://www.colorcharts.org/ccorg/
They have a tool - the CBN Selector that I’ve used to test out colors in my house. It’s pretty cool in that you can use your own digital photo of your room and apply a paint color from any Manufacturer to the walls, trim, and other elements as you have defined them.
Good luck with your painting project!
Tom
February 28th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Tom (teknobear): Thanks for the tip. I will definitely check out that link; and likely post a review of it next. It looked like Behr had a tool on their site for $4.95, but I didn’t want to spring for it (I guess I’m too cheap).
February 29th, 2008 at 9:26 am
I’d like to also add that Behr paint is no where as good as Sherwin Williams paint! All around Sherwin Williams is the way to go.
March 2nd, 2008 at 8:01 pm
I’ve been using Benjamin Moore’s “Personal Color Viewer”… it costs $10, but it was the cheapest program I could run on a Mac. It works pretty well!
March 4th, 2008 at 11:59 am
I’m a little late to the party, but I use Benjamin Moore’s online tool and just pick a room that has similar features to ours. (I don’t pay the $10 because I’m all cheap like that.)
It’s nice for visualization, but I have yet to find that the colors ring true from monitor to wall, a fault that lies with no one as monitor settings vary. Ultimately, there’s no substitute for the little jars of paint. Sigh.
Oh, and I love the Guatemalan artwork from the later entry.