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Sherwin-Williams' Chip It, an online color tool, creates paint palettes based on images that catch your eye. Simply find an online photo with colors you love—a Maui sunset, Parisian café—or use an image saved on your computer and upload it to letschipit.com. A palette of up to 10 Sherwin-Williams' colors instantly appears, corresponding to the hues in your photo. And while we like this online app, not all Sherwin-Williams paints measured up in Consumer Reports paint tests.
Chip It pulls from more than 1,500 hues that can be used for interior and exterior paints. In our tests of exterior paints, Sherwin-Williams' Duration Flat, Satin, and Gloss were very good and are among our top paint picks. But they're around $68 a gallon, twice the price of some of our other top choices. In fact, paints from Glidden, Behr and Valspar were named CR Best Buys and range in price from $21 to $28 a gallon.
Unfortunately, Sherwin-Williams' Duration Home interior paints weren't as impressive in our tests. The satin wasn't very good at hiding, the matte didn't cover stains, and the semi-gloss didn't hide well and dulled after cleaning. Ace Hardware's Clark+Kensington tops our ratings of satin and semi-gloss interior paints and paints from Valspar and Behr are our top picks for flat finishes.
If you're looking for a specific color, most paint stores can make a match. But using an online color tool may introduce you to hues you hadn't thought of.
