How To Use Benjamin Moore's Paint Visualizer

There are a million things we have to do in the new house. After much deliberation we decided our first project to tackle would be painting. As much as we would love to have furniture first, we decided we would wait until the walls were painted so we didn't have too much to move. We also think fresh paint will make the place seem more of our own.

The existing colors in the house are very dark. As everyone already knows, dark colors make the house look smaller and very gloomy. So we decided to have every room in the house painted to get rid of the existing smell of mothballs and use fresh, light colors.

Finding the perfect color for each room is very difficult.

This has been my life for the last week...

 

 

 Since it can be so hard to imagine what the color on a paint chip will look like on an entire wall, I knew there had to be a better way. I look at the Benjamin Moore website and they have something called a color visulaizer. It seems like most paint companies have these things.

Pretty much the color visulaizer just shows you what the color from the color chip will look like in your room. Here is the link to the website.

The web version is somewhat slow so I downloaded it to my computer. It is faster this way and easier in my opinion. Here is a mini tutorial on how to use this program:

Even though it looks bad, I will make the pictures really big so you can all see what I am talking about.

STEP 1
The is the first thing you will see when you open the visualizer. You want to click on the little camera in the center to upload your own picture.

(It's a good idea to take pictures of the rooms to use for this.)

STEP 2
Once you select a picture to upload you have to show the program what you want to be painted. Click on the "Wall" button then the "Connect the dots around suface to paint button" which looks like a little green rectangle.

STEP 3
So basically click only around the walls. Do not do the trim or anything you may want to accent. We will do this part later. When you are done and finally connect that first dot and the last dot, that section on the wall should turn green. Make sure to click outside of the green box one time to allow the part you just colored to save. It should look something like this.

Tip- If you want to paint three walls one color and one wall a differnet color just group together any walls that will be the same color and do the other wall seperatly.

STEP 4
Now we can do our trim. We do the same thing we did to the wall. Except we click on "Trim" and then the little green, square.

STEP 5
Now the trim will turn green when it is all connected together just like the wall did. It should look something like this:

STEP 6
In this room I might want the beam in the middle to be an accent color so I will repeat steps 4 & 5. First click on "Accent" (which is right below trim), then the green rectangle. Then connect the dots until the accent wall or object turns green. Like so...

When all of your areas are finished click on the "Paint Photo" button.

STEP 7

Now you can just drag and drop different paint colors in the areas of either wall, trim or accent that you want.

 

You do this by clicking on the shade you want. Keep holding down your mouse, and drag the color over towards your picture. You can see how the color turns into a little box as you drag it. Keep moving the box over the picture until you see the area you want light up with the green. Now you can relase the mouse button for that color to go to that area.

 

This is what I am thinking for our living room. Just keep in mind that the colors on the computer screen vary from the actually color of the paint. I have been writing down the colors that I think look good from the visualizer and going to a paint store to find the actual Benjamin Moore chips so I can see the colors in person.

(Walls: Pike's Peak Gray, Trim: White, Accent: Bottle of Bordeaux)



Hope this was helpful! And happy paint picking!!
And feel free to post any questions you may have.
I'll try my best to answer them.