HGTV had an add for some paint manufactorer that had software to help in choosing a color for a room. You scan-in a picture of your room and put it in the software. Then you choose colors and see how it looks. The software removes your wall coloring and replaces it with the colors you choose.
I thought I remember them saying it was
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but I've searched their site and I can't find it -- though they have an awesome site with TONS of good ideas. They also said Home Depot had it... but when I stopped by, they were out and didn't expect to get any more disks for some time.
Does anyone know where I can download this program? The Behr website does have something where you can choose a picture of a room and they'll change colors for you... but I didn't see how to do your own photos. Unless I totally misunderstood the commercial.
hi Alex Im not sure but benjamin moore is usually on top of all new stuff either way they do have one of the best laid out fan decks sorry I cant answer your question
Remember that while this can give you a good "gist", that unless you can color-calibrate your monitor (and even then) it won't give you a realisitic idea. Some colors are worse than others--I've never met a computer monitor that can do a reasonable job with some of the darker, more saturated teal and green colors, for example, and blues are really dicy.
I do the same sort of thing in Photoshop on a regular basis...simply selecting all the walls and making the selection into a mask to help change wall colors without affecting furnishings, then applying the color on a separate layer and blending it based on color rather than simply pasting it over. That way I keep my shadows. But even so, the results "on the wall" are always a bit different. Have you ever bought a can of paint based on a chip, then gotten it onto the walls to discover that it looks like you've smeared toothpaste on the wall? (or something from the medicine cabinet, etc...)
Things always look different in person, and I don't know anything that will beat doing a test can, test board, whatever.
I only go straight to the walls if I know that I'm not too worried about painting over if I don't like it, even if I have done a computerize mockup.
LSD always helps me with a world of colors, but liek you I forget things too. Man I miss living in CA. Wait, I did live there din't I? Oh well.. Back to the NightTrain.
Dunno about specialty programs for this, but I did what you're wanting quite easily using Photoshop Elements ($80 watered-down version of Photoshop). We were wanting to get an idea of what color to paint our new workshop vis a vis our house nearby.
I used a digital camera for the image of the house and shop, but one could certainly use a scanner, too. I masked the wall areas, flooded the masked areas with color, saved, and repeated several times with differing shades. Then displayed the doctored images as a slide show--it appeared that the shop was changing color as each was displayed.
I'm pretty sure you can do the same thing Corel's PhotoPaint or Jasc's Paintshop.
You're right in that nothing compares to testing the color on the wall... but I'll at least get an idea of what primary color to go with. I have no idea whether I want to do green, blue, brown, etc, and looking at a photo of my rooms with something other then white (which is what it has now) will give me some ideas. I thought about hiring someone to come in and do some consulting, but money is a huge factor.
The Behr website has really given me some awesome starting points with choosing colors and matching things that'll go with my furniture. I have pieces of cloth from all my furniture, so that'll also help in pinpointing my colors at the store.
Thanks for the info, and if you have any technical tips to post regarding photoshop, I'd love to hear them. I have done masking to crop photos, but I've never done it with my room photos. How do you compensate for the shadows, etc?
This is a great way to start, but you may find some colors difficult to match, and it may be that what looks good in a small dose on a couch looks absolutely wretched on a wall--sometimes going a couple shades lighter or darker than your "inspiration" can really work to your advantage vs. matching exactly.
Working in the full version of Photoshop 6.01, here's my procedure. This may be possible in Photoshop elements, but the procedure will be a little different and I don't know how much play the "lite" program gives you in layer management.
Use the polygon lasso tool to closely select either the walls or anything that you don't want to color. Use alt-clicking to subtract areas from your selection and shift-clicking to add areas to your selection. Feather your selection a LITTLE bit, depending on the resolution of the original photos your feather may only be 2 pixels or in a very high resolution photo, as much as 5-10 pixels. If you've selected the walls, copy your selection. If you've selected "everything else", invert your selection and copy the wall portion.
Paste this into a new layer. Select all on the new layer. Pick a foreground color. Now... use "fill", using the foreground color, checking the "preserve transparancy" function. Now you will have a blank section of that color. Here's the magic photoshop part of it.
Go to your layer palette. Select the "wall only" layer. Set your transparency to, oh, 50%. Experiment with blending modes. I find that "Hard light" and "Color" and "hue" all give interesting results. Soft light looks fairly realistic in the shadows but won't "match" your foreground color. Overlay is probably the best. Using a 50% transparancy and "overlay" to put flaming bright purple into a photograph of a white wall, I get the closest representation of what that wall would actually look like. Dark shadows down a hallway are still dark shadows, but they're dark PURPLE shadows. The highlights are my foreground color. However, putting a dark purple on a light wall required either NO transparancy or different blend modes. This is one place where you kind of have to wing it based on what looks right to you. With the very dark purple, "Multiply" at 70% looked great.
"Difference" and "Exclusion" can generate some trippy and impractical results, but may get you to thinking "outside of the box".
If your walls already happened to be a color, it would be almost easier. You'd simply blend by "color" or "hue".
That's exactlly what I wanted to do... and work perfectly in Photoshop. Thanks!!! I've taken several photos of my living room from various angles, and I'm using Acdsee to move between the various layouts to see what works. Once I find some general colors, I'll hit the paint stores and get samples to try out.
Benjamin Moore has a program specifically for trying different colours on your walls. I downloaded a version for about $14 and loaded some of my digital pics in and played with a few different colours.
Nice thing was that I didn't have to learn photoshop and the BM program had the notion of connected surfaces so I could mark out all the wall surfaces in a room and paint them witha a click, leaving trim, windows, mirrors, furniture etc alone.
That's fine, and if you want to pay to download a program to do that, great. Having photoshop on hand and already knowing it, I don't see the point--the poster I was talking to also had photoshop. Many people already have PhotoShop or PhotoShop Elements.
I can easily set up a room picture (takes about 10 minutes) so that I can paint the walls quickly, leaving trim, etc. alone. Then I can paint the trim quickly, and change furnishing colors the same way. With creative use of snapshots and layers, etc. it's easy to flip back and forth. Heck... I can even spackle the walls (using the clone tool) if I need to! If only I could print to my room....
I've used interior decorating programs, and they're okay. But for a PhotoShop junkie, most of the time it's not worth the bother of going into another program.
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