Want to makeover your home or office?  Is it you who decided to paint your infrastructure but, after entering the paint show, just staring endlessly at the frames of paint samples and suddenly realized wasted so much time? At times,  nothing makes sense and doing the whole frustrating process again. Those days are gone. In this technological era, there are various free augmented-reality based paint visualizer apps that allow you to paint your room virtually. So, we can actually see how colors look with the help of a paint visualizer app.         

Most of the time a paint visualizer app is fun to use. Well, some apps are a bit boring, but the fun part is that all of them are far superior to the way we used to pick paints. Let’s take a look.

To evaluate these three desktop programs and three apps, I used two professionally shot photos from our House Tours, as well as one I snapped of my living room just using my phone and no special lighting or filters. For each app, I used the simplest method of painting offered and did not highlight individual areas by hand except when that was the only (terrible) option.

Paint Visualizer App helps users find the perfect colors for their walls with the Color Visualizer Tool.

Let’s take an example of a few paint visualizer apps

Olympic Paint Visualizer

Format: Desktop program

Download Image?: Yes

Email Image?: Yes

Share Image?: Facebook and Pinterest

Pros: Easy to use, huge color selection, no login required, you can undo actions, you can auto-fill or hand-select areas, you can develop a palette before you start painting, program preserved shadows so you can see how the color actually functions in light, the program handled rooms with lots of detailing (window frames, molding, and so on) better than most other apps, and the email option will send you the color names, numbers and swatches.

Cons: Not able to handle detailing perfectly, paints are organized by large color group (yellow, purple, etc.) but are apparently random within each group, colors appeared lighter as compare to shown in swatches, and after downloading the image you are not able to view your paint info.

Benjamin Moore Personal Color Viewer

Format: Desktop program

Download Image?: No

Email Image?: No

Share Image?: No

Pros: Maintains shadows in the image, more helpful than having no app at all, definitely useful if you prefer Benjamin Moore paints.

Cons: Login needs to be created, not able to get into the function on Chrome, there is no specific order for colors, can’t create a palette, surfaces are highlighted using hand (a total pain even if you have a touchscreen laptop), can’t un-highlight areas except with a tiny eraser tool, doesn’t color dark areas well, no saving option available, and absolutely tedious to use. Swear words may have been uttered when I finished the first room and remembered I had two more to do.

Home Depot Project Color

Format: iOS and Android apps

Download Image: Yes

Email Image?: Yes

Share Image?: Twitter and Facebook

Pros: Extremely fast and easy to use, you can easily adjust lighting (daylight, LED, glowing), image is saved with color swatches/names/numbers, you can undo actions, and fills areas well.

Cons: Have to provide email address

Glidden ColorAPP

Format: iOS (I can’t find a link but it’s in the App Store) and Android app

Download Image?: Yes

Email Image?: Yes

Share Image?: Twitter

Pros: No login is required, you can undo actions, maintains shadows in photos, and it was so convenient to use that even though the app is in Spanish, people with English had no trouble in understanding

Cons: Appears to only be available in Spanish, if you download image it doesn’t include the paint information so you need to take a screenshot, swatches are organized by colours but fairly randomly (example: all the oranges together in no particular order), and has a bit of trouble differentiating between surfaces (ceiling vs. wall, for example).

Paint Visualizer App – Cost To Develop A Feature-rich App

Wireframing

Wireframing is an important process of building an app; this is because it will build the foundation of how the app needs to be designed and function. One important thing to note is that with mobile apps, it will be much more time-consuming and costly to redo the screens or rebuild functionality than a web app, so, it is important to build the wireframes before starting the development.

App Screen Design

Designing the app screens (front-end) for both iOS and Android.

App Programming

Programming the app screens (front-end) for both iOS and Android.

Application / Database Framework

Setting up the application’s server-side framework (cloud/back-end) and creating the database structure.

Server-side Application Programming

Writing all of the server-side code for implementing the back-end functionality.

APIs Development

Writing all of the APIs that connect the app screens to the server-side application and database.

Usability QA 

Testing the app screens for bugs and fixing any issues.

Multi-platforms, Multi-devices, OS versions, Resolutions QA 

Testing the app on all different platforms (iPhone, Android, Windows Phone) and different OS versions of each platform (Apple iOS has two popular versions: iOS 8 and iOS 7, Android OS has five popular versions (Android 4.1,4.2,4.3,4.4,5.0), Different resolutions of different mobile devices (between different devices of smartphones, phablets, and tablets, there are quite a bit resolutions to test for and it can be time-consuming.)

Back-end QA

Testing the back-end code for performance and security.

Cloud Setup

Deploying the server-side application to the server/cloud.

Submit to App Stores 

Deploying the app to the App Stores / Play Stores.

Talent needed to Build a Quality Mobile App

Building a quality mobile app requires many steps and requires different talents with different specialties:

Based on resources needed for the work and process,  below mentioned is a ballpark cost estimate on building apps.  

                                                                                                                                   Cost is in ($)Dollars