Color Capture

Just for clarification, I have an iPhone 4S and I've been working in Benjamin Moore dealers off and on for 15 years. I match and correct colors by eye. The technology Behind this app is awesome. I love seeing all the color collections in one place, and I definitely appreciate what they were trying to do with the pocket spectrometer on the phone. However, on my phone at least, the colors wind up being far too brown. My immediate thought was that it was my phone – or my camera. However, when I first see the picture it looks true to life, more or less. Then, when I tell The app that I do want to use that image, it collects the image and turns it browner. See if yours does the same thing – watch it change when you say yes to the image. It's not exactly a small change, either, when light slate blue becomes light taupe. That shift – at least on my phone – turns the colors and often eliminates those that are really options. So what can be done? Maybe some kind of calibration option? Maybe a reset/update? As I said, maybe it's my phone, but I'd love to hear others' thoughts.

I’ll preface by saying I’m reviewing this from the perspective of an Architect and what we’re looking for in our process. Having the entire expanse of the Benjamin Moore catalog (and maybe replacing the need to carry a massive bag of color fans) easily accessible is great but there are enough bugs and limitations keep it from being a killer app on the job-site. The app currently crashes when certain colors are loaded or when clicking the export button. I was excited to see we could save and share groups of colors but was disappointed to learn they’re arbitrarily limited to five and the share sheet is buggy at best. In addition, viewing a saved group only allows you to see the colors as small squares rather than utilizing the entirety of screen real estate. In that vein it would also be more useful for color chips to have an option to fully fill the screen rather than just a portion. Calibration, especially given iOS devices have the option for a True Tone display, should be handled in a better manner.

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The intended functionality is a fantastic tool, however, the colors are not true. The colors are much darker in reality than how they are presented in the app or online (I would think they use the same assets.) I cross referenced the colors in the app to the swatches in store, and they were very different. The final paint on walls was much closer to the physical swatch than the colors in the app. I even tried to adjust my brightness / contrast levels to match the colors in order to be able to use the app, but it wasn't just a matter of the colors being xx percentage darker. Theoretically great, but basically useless since the colors aren't true. I also tried repeatedly to do a color match using the functionality, but the camera in the phone wouldn't capture a true representation of the color, even with adjustments in exposure and white balance so... basically useless. Great in theory though. I wish the colors were a better match. If they were this would be a great tool.

I find the app generally helpful. Though I know the colors on my iPhone 4s are nowhere accurate to the real thing, I do find it very helpful in the fact that the colors are all very relative to one another. This gives me a good idea if I'm matching colors relative to others I'm already familiar with. Though in the end, I would still use my actual fan decks. I do also wish, the app would allow you to pull in more then five personal colors in your Favorites pallet. As it is, you have to generate multiple favorites groupings.

This app was a wonderful help to sample colors especially when you can upload your own picture and apply the colors of your choice. It is very fun to use and user friendly. The only problem was that I didn’t see with the Affinity collection how I could pick any number of Affinity colors to see how they look together. The color palettes were predetermined within Affinity and the paired colors were not always another Affinity collection color. Maybe this feature is there and I didn’t see it.