I’ll be the first one to tell you that my Photoshop skills are mediocre at best, so please squint your eyes a little when you are looking at these photos today. I’ve only had access to Photoshop for about 5 months, and I hardly ever use it. After getting my first DSLR camera this past November, I took a class called Photography Masterclass (really affordable, really effective!) to learn to use it. The class included tutorials on how to use Lightroom and Photoshop for editing photos by adjusting the exposure, temperature, contrast etc. I didn’t really know how to do much else beyond those basic photo edits in Photoshop, but after getting a decorating question from my sister, I knew that Photoshop would be a helpful tool if I could figure it out.
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My sister and her husband bought a fixer upper about a year ago that has so much charm. They are slowly fixing it up and doing most of the work themselves. The kitchen is massive and has tons of cabinet and countertop space, but it needs a decent amount of work. Back in January, I helped her paint the cabinets pictured below (this is only about ¼ of her cabinets). The cabinets were a dark walnut color before we painted them gray. She also wants to update her backsplash (roosters aren’t her style?), her countertops (she might paint them!) and her linoleum flooring. Did I mention she had a big project on her hands?
After she gets the rest of the cabinets painted she wants to paint the walls of the kitchen too. She was asking my opinion on some paint colors, and that is where Photoshop comes in. It can be really hard to visualize how paint colors will look in a room. I am a huge advocate of buying sample sizes of paint to test on the wall, but at this stage she wasn’t even sure which color she wanted to try. She was considering a rusty red color (to go with the amazing brick she has!), yellow, and blue. So I asked her to take a photo and send it to me so I could help her see how those colors might look in her kitchen.
The first color I tried on the walls was white. She didn’t ask for white, but I personally am a big fan of a neutral paint color that you can then accessorize with colorful art, vases and linens. Paint isn’t really that expensive when it comes to decorating, but it is a lot of work. If she got tired of having yellow in her kitchen, it would be easier to find new accessories in a different color than to have to repaint the wall. That being said, sometimes color on the wall is just what a room needs.
I attempted to paint over the countertop and backsplash because their yellow tones were throwing off the overall look of the photo. I also added the art and vases to give her an idea of what accessorizing with color could look like.
The next color I tried was a bright blue.
Here’s how it would look in yellow.
Then I tried a rusty red. I actually used what is called an eyedropper tool in Photoshop to pull a color from the brick wall.
Ok, so those photos cover the colors my sister originally requested. After getting some feedback from her, she wanted me to try a different shade of blue, the bright blue was too bright.
This blue reminds me of denim and has a muddier feel that should keep the paint color from being too bright or neon on the wall like the first blue could turn out to be.
And then because I love navy, I went a little darker on one last photo.
Ok, so I certainly have a favorite, what about you? Which would you choose? I think my sister is leaning toward the denim blue, and I really like that one but would be really tempted to go with navy. I know she wants to keep her kitchen lighter though, so the denim could be a really good option.
Now, none of these colors are actual paint colors, so you can’t go to the paint store and just request “denim blue”, they will think you are crazy. I googled around really quickly one night and used the eyedropper tool to put this together for her, just so that she would have an idea of what color family to even start looking in. All I did was google “yellow kitchen”, find a photo with a color I liked, copied the photo to bring it into Photoshop, and then used the eyedropper tool to essentially copy the color and use it to “paint” my sister’s kitchen. I did that for each color. If she had needed me to get more specific, I could have. For example, I could have googled Hale Navy and used a photo with that paint color to paint my sister’s kitchen. Then she could have gone and picked up a sample of that specific color to test on her wall.
Who knew I would be using my limited Photoshop skills for decorating? It was a really fun little experiment, and I hope to continue to learn more skills with Photoshop in the future! If you need help with a paint color, send me an email at shandy@happymeetshome.com, I just might be able to help you!
As always, I appreciate you reading and I love hearing from you!
