Ask, and ye shall receive (!!!)

Not too long ago I got all googly eyed thinking about:

And lo and behold, out comes two new (killer) iPhone apps:

Sherwin Williams Colorsnap
and
Benjamin Moore ColorCapture

I immediately swooned and downloaded both applications and have played around with them both a bit.  And, voila, here are a few initial observations:

Sherwin William’s version is nice because it gives you the RGB numbers (always helpful), and the color picker is a little easier to use as it has a little arrow and box so you can more easily see and pinpoint exactly what spot you’re picking from. When you save the primary color, it includes swatches of the secondary colors. I find it a bit annoying that, at least thus far, it only gives you one palette set to go with each primary color.

Benjamin Moore’s version give you the option of looking at the primary color with a palette of varying colors that might go with it, as well as looking at a palette of the primary color you chose with a palette in similar hues much like you get in a normal paint chip. It’s nice because it also has a color wheel you can play with, so you don’t necessarily need a photo in order to peruse colors. When you save a color, just a swatch of that particular “primary” color is saved and you can add notes for your own reference. Also nice is that you can click a color so that it fills the screen so you can sort of have a large paint swatch at your disposal to hold up to walls or what-have-you. At the moment, I’m a bit let down by the actually “color picking” – you just scroll your finger around without the definition of an indicator to see which exact spot your picking from. Granted, if I hadn’t seen Sherwin William’s picker, I’d probably have no complaints. I also wish it could access RGB info for each color – probably my main complaint, as otherwise it’s pretty awesome.

Super Simple Summary: Overall, they’re both nice but Benjamin Moore’s ColorCapture has more features to play around with so it’s a bit more useful perhaps as an all around tool for color lovers; Sherwin William’s ColorSnap is definitely great at it’s prescribed task at being able to extract a color from a photo, which is all some people might need. It could be an easy decision if you prefer one brand of paint to the other, and are strictly using it to hunt down a particular shade – for this use, each application also will use the iPhone’s GPS to direct you to the nearest retail location.

I wish, for either and/or both of them that you could create your own palettes, be it by picking individual colors, combining other “saved” colors, or being able to extract multiple colors from a photo and save them as a palette (which could be pretty handy), etc.

Regardless, I’m exceptionally excited that these two application exist. Dreams do come true!

Much love to Design*Sponge for the heads up!