Chip It App: Create an Instant Color Palette

Some folks are gifted when it comes to choosing colors. Then there are the rest of us. I have a basement shelf full of little tester paint cans because I never can quite nail down that perfect shade I have in my head. Heaven help me if I need to choose a complementing accent color to boot, then all is surely lost. So when I see pictures of rooms with three or four daring but perfect colors, I am in awe and at a total loss as to how to achieve such a look. Thankfully, help has arrived.

Sherwin Williams has an amazing (and addicting) new color selection tool calledChip It!that allows the most hopeless among us to create palettes with the click of a button. Simply go to the Chip It! website, drag the program into your toolbar and then find an image that contains a color scheme you want to emulate. Click on the button in your toolbar, hover over the image and press the Chip It! button that appears. Presto, instant color palette! I can now capture the feel of this pizza, which was pretty darn amazing and worth immortalizing.

There are two downsides here. The first is in order to save your chip cards, you have to log in with your Facebook account. This seems odd and shortsighted, and screen captures are an easy workaround for that. The other downside is that it is sort of addicting. I guarantee you will be Chip It!-ing all types of things, whether they deserve it or not.

The Chip It! applet is a free download available atLet’s Chip It!

(Images: 1.Northdixie Designs2.Richard Popovic)