I’ve downloaded the Color Capture app from Benjamin Moore and have been tinkering with it during my latest home improvement project. My wife and I are repainting two hallways in the house and wanted to try to use an app to zero in on the color. We are big fans of Benjamin Moore’s products so downloading this app was a no brainer for us.
Unfortunately, the Benjamin Moore “ColorCapture” app is nice in theory but in practical application it doesn’t work at all. Sure, you can view hundreds of different colors on your phone or tablet. Yes, you can take a picture with your phone and match it to a Benjamin Moore color, but you’re wasting your time.
The Color Wheel Is Unreliable
The sample colors in the app look very nice on the screen but unfortunately that’s not the way that they appear on the color swatches that you can pick up in the store. Your device just isn’t capable of reliably reproducing those colors on a screen.
There’s actually a warning about this on the page where you download the app. Ben Moore recommends that you come down to the store and get one of their pre-printed color chips. Their are just too many variables between devices and displays to give an accurate representation of color.
To confuse matters even more the color swatches that you pick up at the store won’t look like that once you brush them on your wall. So not only is the application not a substitution for going to your local Benjamin Moore store and picking out a color that you like, but picking out a color from the hundreds of different swatches is no substitution for buying paint samples and using a brush to put a small swatch of color up on your wall.
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Matching Colors To Pictures Taken With Your Phone
The app also allows you to take a picture with your device and to match the color of anything in the picture to one of their colors. Check out this screen shot I took of the app. The color of my wall looks yellow and the application recommends that I use a yellow color. The color that they recommend is Glen Gold Ridge.
Do you know what color my wall is? It’s green.
Because of the lighting in the room and the shadows, the phone and the app are not able to get an accurate representation of the color.
So What Is This App Good For
The application is good for brainstorm and to draw inspiration from but when you get to the store take a second look at the color chips. Then buy 3 or 4 of your favorite colors as small paint samples. Brush a 12” x 12” swatch of each on your walls and leave it there for a few days. The color will look different throughout the day as the sun rises, sets, and moves though the sky.