Colors on Walls Share a photo

About

How this site works

Colors on Walls is run by PaintCrafters, a painting company in the Twin Cities west metro, Minnesota. There are far more paint colors than any one painter uses, so the photos here come from several places — and each one says where it came from.

Where the photos come from

  • Our own jobs. Rooms and houses PaintCrafters painted, with the brand, color number and sheen from our job records.
  • Other painters. Photos from painting contractors' jobs, used with their permission and credited to them.
  • Homeowners and visitors. Anyone can share a photo of a color they used. We check each one before it appears.

Curated photos are marked and shown first. A color page is offered to search engines once it has at least 3 real photos; until then you can still look the color up in the library.

What we check before a photo goes up

That the color named is plausible for what's on the wall, that the photo is the sender's own, and that it shows no people, house numbers, license plates or street views. Location data (GPS) stored in phone photos is removed on upload.

The visualizer

It runs entirely in your browser: an open-source segmentation model (SAM 2.1, Apache-2.0) finds the surface you tap, and the new color replaces the old one while keeping the shadows and texture from your photo. Your photo is never uploaded. The color on screen is an approximation — your light and your screen change it, just as they change real paint.

How we measure

Hex, RGB and LRV come from each manufacturer's published data, with a link and the date we fetched it. “Lean” is measured from the color's Lab hue angle. Matches across brands use CIEDE2000 on published screen values; under 1 is hard to see, 2 or more is visible side by side. Color families are assigned by one rule across every brand, from measured lightness, chroma and hue.

How the site makes money

Some sample links may earn a commission, and the site may carry display ads. PaintCrafters also gets estimate requests from readers in the Twin Cities. None of that changes which colors we show or what we say about them.

Our sister site

PaintCrafters also runs PaintJobCalc, free calculators for how much paint to buy, what a painting job costs, and estimating tools for painting contractors. The two sites link to each other and share this look.