How the visualizer works

The example rooms

The seven rooms at the top of color and comparison pages (a living room, bedroom, dining room, kitchen, bathroom, home office and a house exterior) are illustrations made with an AI image model, with plain gray walls. The paint color is never produced by an image model: this site's own code repaints the walls, or the siding on the house, in the exact color.

Each page opens on the living room, painted when the site is built; the other six rooms are painted in your browser when you pick them.

For each room we keep a mask that marks which pixels are wall. The code measures how light each wall pixel is compared with the middle of the wall, so shadows and corners stay darker and bright patches stay brighter (bright patches are softened a little). It then sets every wall pixel to the paint color at that pixel's own light level. North and south light apply the same fixed shift as the swatches described below.

The rooms are illustrations, not photographs of real rooms. Screen colors vary; test a sample before you paint.

A tool for trying a color on a photo of your own wall is coming.

North light and south light

North-facing rooms get cool, indirect light. South-facing rooms get warmer, direct light. To show this, the page takes the paint color in the CIE Lab color space and applies a fixed shift: for north light, 4 units darker, 1 unit less red and 5 units less yellow; for south light, 4 units lighter, 1 unit more red and 6 units more yellow. The result is converted back to a screen color.

These shifts are a simple, documented simulation chosen to show the direction of the effect. They are not a measurement of any real room.

What it cannot do

It cannot correct for your screen, the white balance of the room pictures, glossy surfaces, textured walls or a room with several light sources. It does not know the real light in your room at different times of day. A very white or very dark paint cannot get much lighter or darker on screen, so the north and south versions of such colors can look alike.

Use it to compare colors with each other and to rule options out. Choose the final color with a physical sample on your own wall, looked at in the morning, at midday and in the evening.

Where AI is and is not used

The seven example room pictures were made with an AI image model. The paint color, the shading and the north and south light are fixed color arithmetic run by this site's code and your browser.