Starting today, if you’ve got an iPhone, you can banish interior paint color selection anxiety forever!
Download the new benColor Capture iPhone App for free from the iPhone App Store. Then use your iPhone camera to take any picture, and the iPhone app shows you the closest matching colors in the Benjamin Moore paint catalog.
There are more than 3,300 paint color choices, so you’re guaranteed to find the one perfect paint color you’re looking for.
Better yet, shake the iPhone when your color matches appear, and the Benjamin Moore app will show you coordinating colors for your new instant palette. Confirm your selection, and the iPhone’s GPS system will direct you to the nearest retailer selling the Benjamin Moore paint. Sherwin Williams also has a free iPhone app called ColorSnap, and theirs includes an RGB color converter (for you graphic and interior designers). But its iPhone catalog *only* carries 1,500 paint colors.
These apps would have saved me about 40 hours of agony about a year ago when I went on a paint-chip treasure hunt for the perfect *taupe* to repaint my family room. I live in a big house with an open-space floor plan where the walls in the room “never end.”
The goal was just to paint one room. But in an Atrium-Ranch-style home, the walls of one room connect to almost every other room in the house. For example, the north wall of the family room continues into the hallway and down to the guest bedroom. The south wall flows upstairs by way of all 3 walls in the Atrium (the fourth wall is the floor-to-ceiling Atrium windows).
Consequently, I couldn’t just pick one room color. I also had to make sure that if I kept painting, wherever I stopped would match the color in the adjoining room. And if it didn’t, I had to know ahead of time which complementary color I would use for the next room.
Have you gone paint-chip shopping? I think I did manage to scan at least 3,300 paint color choices (or it just seemed that way) before I got so overwhelmed that I finally gave up and put the painting project on hold for months. Even one color strip had a color palette and how could you be sure different strips belonged together on your walls? (Insert funeral music here!)
Now there’ll be no more paint-chip anxiety for me. Ahh, technology!
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Sherwin-Williams has a great color matching app, ColorSnap, already available in the app store – check it out. It’s awesome.
The app isn’t working very well… I spent nearly 10 hours testing it…
http://areaaesthetics.typepad.com/airings_on_design_by_area/2009/06/confessions-of-an-app-addict-the-skinny-on-color-apps-for-the-iphone-.html
Peggy Berk
Airings on Design