Recently I went to Kentucky to spend Christmas with my family. While being there I notice that trees, flowers and skies were of a different tone and color. But surprisingly enough with their grayish hue, I loved the colors around me. So I dedicates some time to take pictures of these contrast of color in the nature.

With pictures in hand I thought to myself “wouldn’t this photos inspired a space?”. Well of course they can and it is the easiest thing to do. I’m going to show you how to use those very special pictures you have taken and wish you could translate them into color, or even decoration.

The aide

Over the internet you can find a couple of websites that, with an easy upload of a photo (watch the size and format), it can create a color palette. With this color palette scheme you can select paint for any room in your house. Here is an example of one that I did with some of the pictures I took in Kentucky.

Kuler is a wonderful website that lets you easily upload a photo from your computer, or if you prefer, your Flickr account. The fun part of this program, besides the obvious size of the color palette, is that it lets you select which areas you prefer. On the picture above you can see that I have selected certain points. Also it has a gallery of pre-selected themes or combinations of colors. You just pick one and play. 

In Genopal you can also upload your own picture. After doing so it’ll create a palette base on the most prominent colors. This will show up as eight colored squares under the photo. You can pick one and hit the “finetune with Genopal” which will give you even more hue options. 

Colour Lovers is another great website that allows you to either upload from an url or from Flickr. After you have your photo, it will give you a nice color scheme on the bottom. On the sidebar you can altered one or all of the pre-selected hues. Lets say you will like the second color (the blue one) to be brighter, you can do so by selecting one of the choices on the right sidebar.

Applying the palette to real life

I decided that the scheme of colors that I will use is from the first photo. You can print the palette from your printer or, in my case, I took it in my phone and with it I went to Home Depot. It was so much easier to select colors with my palette on hand. Here is what I came with. 

Remember you can always buy from Behr the sample sizes of paint and try it on a small space in your wall before you decide the real deal. I did so, and here is how it looks.

Now that we have an idea of which colors to use, tomorrow I’ll be using a new palette but not for the wall paint. This time I’ll use the scheme for decoration purposes.