Better Homes and Gardens Picture Painter [Old Version]

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $19.39

Features:

• Fun and easy home-painting software; no design experience needed
• Visualize new colors, textures, and materials before repainting or remodeling
• Choose brands like Benjamin Moore, Sherwin-Williams, and Cultured Stone
• Simply take a picture and point-and-click to make changes
• Built-in photo editing tools; built-in library of 4,000+ materials and colors

Accessories:

Micro-Gold Flower Fantasy Deluxe

Customer Reviews:

Powerful -- not just a Paint program [Posted on 2006-07-25]
When I first saw this product I thought it was a more-or-less simple paint program. Not so. There are several features and tools which make this program quite powerful.

Overview of use:

a) Open a picture

b) Outline the areas you want to change, using the tools (see below).

c) Select a color or texture or surface (various paints, bricks or tiles, for example) to use in the outlined areas.

That much is probably expected. Here's what makes this software more powerful than you would guess from the advertising:

1) Fill tool. The first thing I thought of was "well it would be a pain to outline everything on the mantel in the living room." Not to worry. Use the fill tool to select a color region to outline and it fills in the area with the selected color or texture or material. The "fill sensitivity" is adjustable, meaning if the color you are covering is not uniform, that's ok, the tool allows some variation in the color/brightness to still be very effective.

Other tools:
a) polygon - uses straight lines and points to outline a region to be altered. All the polygon points (vertices) are adjustable.

b) variable-sized square and circle "brushes."

2) 32 layers. Put your trim on one layer, your basic wall color on another layer, your accents on another layer. Name them and sort them as you like.

3) All your hard work is retained. You spent the time to carefully outline your color areas in the picture. You sure don't want them to go away. They don't. Save the project file and the next time you open it, you'll see all your outlining is still there. You never need to re-do the outlining for the picture when you want to change colors, textures, etc. (and you shouldn't have to. They did this right.) Outlining becomes invisible in the Select Material mode, as it should, and becomes visible again in the Paint or Erase modes, as it should.

4) What about those shadows? The program somehow figures it out. If the painted plank siding on your house had lighting shadows before the alteration, it will have lighting shadows after the alteration. If all you did was change the color of the plank siding, the planks are still visible, and there's no need to outline each plank. Really nice.

5) "Erasing" tools. You just outlined the side of your house, but the new outlined region includes a window. No problem. Use the erase tool (polygon) and outline the window. There are also circle and square erase "brushes". There is no "fill" tool which _erases_. I think Chief Architect could easily add this to help outline tough areas. Maybe in the next version.

6) Perspective adjustment. This is REALLY important. Say you want to change your concrete driveway to brick. Outline the driveway, drop one of the various brick or paver textures down and it would look stupid without being able to adjust the perspective. Not only can the perspective be adjusted, but the textures can be scaled in size vertically & horizontally, offset vertically and horizontally, and rotated. This is really powerful.

One complaint, but I'm not going to bring down the rating because of it: the product uses Java and is SLOW. Slow to save, slow to update polygon points, etc. HOWEVER, I'm using a 5-year-old 1GHz Pentium 3 (Dell Dimension 4100), so YMMV on this point.

I think that Chief Architect missed the boat on marketing this software. The powerful features are not obvious until you open the package and read through the 37-page manual. Other than that, great job!

Great design aid [Posted on 2007-02-06]
This software is very useful if you are planning to do some painting and have no idea what colors you want. Using your own room photos you can change wall and ceiling colors at will. Great way to 'test' out a color scheme before investing hard work and money into paint.

Easy to Use [Posted on 2007-05-18]
This software is very easy to use and so helfpul for color studies and sharing by email. Amazing what it can do and they charged so little!

Useful program - but a bit slow [Posted on 2007-08-19]
The program works as advertised and is a useful application for exploring color schemes and surfaces.

Apparently, since it was written in Java, it is slow to start and is generally sluggish in use.

It is also fairly "minimalist" in its interface, you can add polygons and fill areas with a great deal of clicking, but I have not found a way to select and edit old polygons... or to move polygons from one layer to another.

Be aware, that to get a good result you should commit to spending the time to create a good set of layers, polygons and fill areas.

Its OK, but a bit clunky to use on a victorian [Posted on 2007-09-19]
I have a brick victorian home with lots of wooden architectural details that need to be painted.

Already mentioned in a previous review is that you cannot edit polygons once they are created. This a little annoying at first, but once you know it its easy enough to zoom in and make sure its just right before finalizing it.

My main issue with the tool is that I have not yet found an easy way to copy a paint color/transparency/brightness/etc fromm one layer to another. I have to pick the color for each layer manually. This makes it take longer to match up the colors that I want to be the same, as I am still trying to determine if the trim should have 2, 3, or even 4 colors.

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