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January 9, 2021

The Easiest Way to Choose a Color Palette for Your Home

Decorate

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Choosing a color palette for your home can feel daunting. Where do you start? What if you hate the colors? What if they don’t work together?

Listen, you can find a bunch of articles about color theory, analogous colors, and undertones that certainly cover how the pros do it. But honestly? There’s an easier way.

In this post, I’ll show you the easiest way to choose a color palette for your home — using completely free online tools and without needing to learn color theory.

Like it? Pin it!

Forget color theory. This is the easiest and only way you ever need to choose colors for your home. Create a color palette for any room with this easy hack that takes less than 5 minutes.

Sometimes making a color scheme for your house can be kind of tricky. There are actually a ton of different ways to do it and, to be honest, a lot of those are based on color theory and other topics you’d cover in design school. I don’t like to mess around with any of that. I personally prefer this one simple method that’s worked for me over and over and over again.

Basically what I like to do is to start with a photo I really love the look of, or rug or a piece of fabric. It doesn’t even have to be something in the room it just needs to be something that has a look and feel that you would want to surround yourself with.  

A piece of fabric or a rug that’s going in the room? All the better. That will make your job ten times easier. It’s better if the textile has a lot of pattern and color in it. For purposes of demonstration, I’ll be using this photo from my library to create the color palette:

Marble coffee table on topof a vintage rug with a candle, book, and glasses.

How to Create a Color Palette for Your Home

To create the color scheme for our room we’re going to use a couple of websites. The first one is called coolers.co. Not com, co. This is actually a website that I used a lot as a graphic designer and it might look a little confusing at first. You’re going to see a lot of codes and formulas that don’t mean much to you, but ignore all that for now.

Go to generate in Coolors to start making your color palette

Using a Photo to Create a Color Palette

Once you have the inspiration photo you’ll be using (whether something you upload or something you found on Pinterest), go to the “Generate” section of Coolors. There are a lot of options here, but we’re only using one for this task. 

Click the camera icon to select your image

How to Use Coolors to Pick a Color Scheme for Your Room

Click the camera icon then select the method you’ll use to feed the generator the image:

  • Select “Upload Image” if you have a photo saved on your phone or computer (locate and upload your image)
  • Select “URL” if you’re using a photo you found online (copy and paste the image address)
  • Select “Camera” if you want to take a photo of a fabric, rug, etc
  • Select “Search” if you don’t have an inspiration image and want to browse the collection from Unsplash.
Select your photo

Now that you have your inspiration photo in the generator, you can move the slider back and forth to generate color palettes based on the photo. I find that I usually want to make tweaks.

To change the auto-suggested color palette in Coolors, click one of the colors you want to change, then click on a portion of the photo you’d prefer to have the color match to. It may take a few clicks to get the exact shade you want since the tool will be picking from hundreds of pixels.

In terms of finalizing your colors, you’re going to want to look for three things: 

  • You want something dark
  • You want something light 
  • You want a neutral 
  • You want one or two accents

Once you pick your dark color, go ahead and click around the photograph to see if you can find your light and continue to do that with your neutral. Choose the accent colors to shake things up. You can even use a couple of shades of those to add even more variety to your palette. You’ll end up with five colors by default but you can add or subtract if needed.

Choose export

Now that you have a color palette you like, you’re going to go ahead and click “Export” then choose “Collage.” This feature is awesome because it will have your photo and your entire palette in one nice little square you can print out and carry with you, or save it to your desktop and use it while you’re shopping online. 

Completed color palette for your room!

How easy was that? Now you have an entire color palette to kick off your room design and how long did that take? 5 minutes, if that?

Interested in learning how to translate those colors to paint swatches? Watch the full video to learn the (just as easy) secret and to watch me walk through Coolors step-by-step to select a color palette for your home.

Watch the Video

About Brianna

Brianna Thomas is the founder of Bloom in the Black, a home decor and DIY blog showing people how to personalize their home through simple projects, smart shopping, and good design. She encourages her readers to stop striving for their house to be “done,” and instead, make small, impactful changes one step at a time. Brianna’s work has been featured in publications such as House Beautiful, Apartment Therapy, and Today.com.

Where to next?

The Secret Garden (At Night) Girls' Bedroom Redesign
Is Wall-to-Wall Carpet The Right Choice? Ever??
The Number One Secret to Finding Your Style
How to Make Your Home Feel Cozy
Previous Post: « How to Make Easy Stencil Art to Match Your Home (Even If You’re a Terrible Artist)
Next Post: Crispy Sweet Potato Gnocchi (With Bacon) »

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About Brianna

Hey, I’m Brianna! First, you should know I’m a homebody to the core. I love surrounding myself with pretty things, yummy food, and settling in for movie marathons with my family. Most of all, I love sharing what I know about making home beautiful…

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