I would buy a fan deck of paint colors from ben moore or other paint store so you have lots of colors to look at and choose from. Then look at the picture and start trying to match up colors with what you see. The rest is practice.

What colors do you see here?

I see multiple shades of blue, brown, tan, olive greens, taupe....

Certainly can build a room around that. What I love about it is, you don't have to be a color expert...Gainsborough has already done the hard work for you....

And wouldn't the Blue Boy look at home in this room...

[Living Room[(https://www.houzz.com/photos/living-room-ideas-phbr0-bp~t_718) by Los Angeles Interior Designers & Decorators Vanessa De Vargas

or this one....

[Traditional Living Room[(https://www.houzz.com/photos/traditional-living-room-ideas-phbr1-bp~t_718~s_2107) by Atlanta Kitchen and Bath Fixtures Insidesign

or this one....

[Midcentury Bedroom[(https://www.houzz.com/photos/midcentury-modern-bedroom-ideas-phbr1-bp~t_715~s_2115) by Melbourne Photographers Sharyn Cairns

With many decorator fabric prints, they show you the colors used to generate the print in the selvage edge...just like a design seed.

Sherwin Williams has a tool called Chip It. Whenever you see a photo online you can click the button in your toolbar and it will create a color palette for you. It gives you 10 coordinating Sherwin Williams colors. Great place to start!

Here is a link that might be useful: Sherwin Williams

I gave up and bought a tissue box that looked pretty. I think I'm going to use those colors for my great room. It has lines of distinct color, not gradients or ranges, so I won't have to guess.

This color stuff is hard if you don't want to go with beige and white! It can look good done well, but we've been living in a sand dune for 10 years (beige walls, beige carpets, wood trim in almost every room) and I'm done with it.

williamsem, if you get the ben moore preview colors, going up and down on the color strip will give you shades of the colors you've selected from the tissue box so you can get more colors that blend.

Also, in my experience, the folks who work at professional paint stores (not HD or lowes) have a lot of color experience and can often help you find and select colors. Some have on staff color experts.

Another source for color inspiration can be wallpaper books. Very often they have a print and then colors that will mix and match with the print...geometrics, stripes, textures that all work in the same color way. Very often, the books will each have a limited selection of colors and show you multiple ways of using them. So there too, the work is already done for you.

I've used the Color Previewer and it is a lot of fun, but I can't hold it up to the picture on the wall, and the colors vary depending on how I have my computer's Brightness set :)

I didn't know I could buy a fan deck! I just checked BM's site, and there are NINE! On one of them, the back of a card has a QR code that links you to color combinations using that color. Ain't technology wonderful?

This is OT, but since this thread has dropped to the 4th page, I hope no one will mind.

I wanted to ask if the third photo Annie posted bothered anyone else? I keep wanting to pull that right curtain over to the left to even things up.