Thursday, March 28, 2024
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How To Choose Color From a Photograph

choose color

Want to choose color for your home using a photograph?

Color inspiration can be found just about anywhere and photographs are one of the best sources.  Grab your camera, take a picture that inspires you and lets talk about it.

At this point we’ve all seen them, thousands if not millions of pictures with those cute little squares, circles or rectangles off to one side depicting possible color combinations derived from one photograph right? Right. What do we think about those images that flood Pinterest and our Twitter streams? They are very pretty and very inspirational but there is more to a pretty picture than meets the eye. I’ll also show you how to get color for your home from any photograph. It’s really quite simple.

color_combos_donna_frasca

 

Many of us take pictures of just about everything from our lunch to our fingernail polish. Why? For several reasons but mainly because somehow or another, these images are pretty or interesting to us in some way. For the most part I think it’s because we like the colors at least that’s what I’m going to assume today.

Let’s talk about this. If you have been reading my blog, and I have several at this point but my main one is Decorating by Donna, you’ll see that I talk about color 99% of the time. I also wrote about this in a blog post titled, “Color May Look Good in a Photograph but That Doesn’t Mean It Belongs in a Color Palette“ and I bring up the point that not just anyone can pick color from these photographs successfully. Even apps fail at times. Read the post and you’ll see what I mean.

I know there are oodles of apps that will magically pick and choose the color palette for you which is fine and dandy. However, I like  to pick my own colors from my photos because I think it’s fun and it’s just what I do – no app needed 🙂

Let’s look at the photograph that I have above. Pretty isn’t it? Garden flowers are always a great source of color for the home because there is such a wide range of hues to choose from and the possibilities are just about endless.

Having said that, I’d like to talk a little more about the range and exactly which colors should be chosen from a photograph.

There are l6 colors that I manually pulled out from this photograph. I could have easily have picked at least another dozen. I have some bright colors, dark colors, light colors and colors that are not as obvious like the ones lurking in the background.

Tell me you can’t choose at least 3-4 colors from this photograph that you’d like to have in your home. I labeled the colors from 1 – 16 so if you wanted to design your own color palette from this photograph, you can just pick a number and then find it’s match in the paint deck of your choice.

If I had to choose 3-4 colors for my home, I’d choose, #5, #6 and #14 for let’s say a kitchen, foyer and living room area for a home that had an open floor plan.

  • For a playroom? Maybe #11 and #13
  • For a Man Cave? How about #2 and #13?
  • #16 and #1 would be a great combo for a little girl’s room
  • #1 and #4 would make a great sunroom choice
  • Steelers Fans? Go for #8 and #11

See the possibilities? So when you’ve chosen a photograph as an inspiration for your home, look at ALL the possible color combinations not just the obvious ones. Which colors would you choose and for what rooms?

 

 

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