Room Paint Visualizer

How to use the paint visualizer

1. Add your room. Tap Upload or take a photo. On a phone you can take the picture right there. No photo handy? Start with one of the sample rooms.
2. Pick a color. Browse the six color families, or type any color code (like #a9b59b) if you already have one from a paint chip or a photo.
3. Tap a wall. The whole wall changes color. Tap another wall to paint it too. Missed a patch next to a window or behind a lamp? Tap that patch as well: the same color joins the same wall.
4. Fix the edges. If the paint spread onto a sofa or the ceiling, move Spread to the left and it redoes your last tap tighter. For the last bits, use the Eraser, or the Brush to paint by hand.
5. Compare and keep it. Before/after puts a slider across the photo. Save image keeps the result, and Copy link shares a sample room with your colors.

How the visualizer keeps your room’s light

A flat color pasted over a wall looks like a sticker, because real walls are never one color: they are brighter by the window, darker in the corners, and warmer under a lamp. The visualizer keeps all of that. It measures how bright every point of the wall is compared with the wall’s average, and gives the new color the same light and shade. A shadow stays a shadow, and the glow from a lamp stays a glow, in the new color.

To find the wall, it grows outward from where you tapped over pixels that match the wall and stops where it meets an edge or a clearly different color, like a picture frame, a door or a sofa. It pays more attention to color than to brightness, because the same wall in shadow is still the same wall.

The rules that decide how a color will look

LRV: how much light a color gives back

Every paint chip lists an LRV, or light reflectance value, from 0 (black, which absorbs all light) to 100 (a perfect white, which reflects all of it). The visualizer shows the LRV of the color you pick, worked out from the color itself. Colors with an LRV of 55 or more bounce light around a room and make it feel larger. Mid-tones (20 to 54) read clearly as a color. Colors under 20 absorb more light than they return, so they make a room feel smaller and cozier, and they need good light to avoid looking flat.

Warm, cool and neutral

A color’s undertone is the hue that shows once it is on a big wall. Warm colors lean red, orange or yellow and feel cozy. Cool colors lean green, blue or violet and feel calm and fresh. A neutral has almost no hue at all. The visualizer labels each color warm, cool or neutral by its hue, so two whites that look alike on a tiny swatch are easy to tell apart.

The light in your room changes the paint

In the Northern Hemisphere, north-facing rooms get cooler, bluer daylight all day, so cool colors can look cold there and warm colors balance them. South-facing rooms get warm, bright light that makes warm colors look stronger. Bulbs matter too: 2700K bulbs give a warm yellow light, and 4000–5000K bulbs give a whiter, cooler one. Take your photo in the light you actually live in, because that is the light the visualizer keeps.

Colors by LRV: chart

A few colors from the swatch board, with the LRV and undertone the visualizer shows for each:

How to take a photo that paints well

• Use daylight, and turn off lamps with a very different color of light, so the wall is lit one way.
• Stand in a corner and show as much wall as you can. The more of the wall is in the picture, the better you can judge the color.
• Skip the flash. It flattens the shadows the visualizer keeps and puts a bright spot on the wall.
• Keep it sharp and level. A blurry photo blurs the edges where the paint has to stop.

Three worked examples

A gray living room in sage. In the sample living room, one tap in the middle of the back wall turns it Sage while the sofa, the cushions and the picture frame stay as they are. A second tap on the window wall paints it the same color, and a third in the shaded strip behind the lamp joins it, because the same color on the same walls is treated as one paint.

A kitchen accent wall. In the sample kitchen, a tap on the wall beside the doorway paints it Terracotta while the green cabinets stay green. Before/after shows how much warmer the room feels. Tap the island’s panels in Navy to try the cabinets too, and use the Brush on any trim the tap missed.

The outside of a house. The same steps work on a photo of your siding, trim or front door: tap the siding for the body color, then the trim, then the door. The exterior house color visualizer has sample houses and starts on the Textured setting, so one tap covers a whole wall of siding, shingle or brick.

Common mistakes when choosing paint colors

• Choosing from a tiny chip. A color looks darker and stronger across a whole wall than on a two-inch square. See it on the whole wall first.
• Ignoring the undertone. Two grays can look the same on the chip and turn out green and purple on the wall. Check the warm, cool or neutral label.
• Judging it in the wrong light. Paint changes from morning to night and under different bulbs. Look at your photo in the room’s real light.
• Trusting the screen for the final decision. Screens and phone cameras shift colors. Use the visualizer to narrow it down to two or three, then paint samples at least 2 ft square on two walls and look at them in the morning, the afternoon and at night.
• Forgetting the fixed things. Floors, counters, tile and big furniture stay. Keep them in the photo, so the new color is judged against them.

Read next

• Greige paint colors that settle the warm versus cool debate
• Warm neutral paint colors that never read cold
• Living room paint color ideas
• Paint colors for small rooms
• Accent walls in the living room