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About this tool
Build a 60-30-10 room palette from the mood you want and the direction your window faces, with LRV and contrast checks.
The Room Mood Colour Selector builds a room palette from two inputs that actually decide how paint looks: the mood you are after and the direction the room's main window faces. It returns a 60-30-10 scheme — dominant wall, secondary, accent, plus a trim tone — and reports the Light Reflectance Value of each colour, computed as sRGB relative luminance (0.2126 red, 0.7152 green, 0.0722 blue after linearisation) on a 0-100 scale. It also checks the contrast between wall, trim and accent against the 3:1 ratio a shape needs to read clearly, and warns when a colour is too dark for a room that only gets cool indirect light.
Open Room Mood Colour Selector on AltFTool — it loads instantly in your browser.
Set the four selects: "Mood you want", "Main window faces", "Hemisphere" and "Colour depth".
The palette rebuilds with no button press — a 60-30-10 band of wall, secondary and accent plus a trim tone, each swatch card showing its hex value, its LRV and its HSL numbers.
Check "Wall to trim contrast" and "Wall to accent contrast" against the 3:1 ratio, read any caution about a colour too dark for cool indirect light, then press "Copy result" to copy every colour with its LRV.
Warms and lifts the palette for a room with cool indirect light, and lets a sunny room take deeper colour.
Tells you how much light each shade gives back, the number decorators use to judge a paint chip.
The accent's lightness is tuned until it clears 3:1 against the wall, so it never merges into the background.
In the northern hemisphere a north-facing room gets cool, indirect light all day, so warm-leaning colours with an LRV above about 60 keep it from reading grey. Cool greys and deep blues are the ones that most often disappoint in that light. In the southern hemisphere it is the south-facing rooms that get this treatment.
Light Reflectance Value is the percentage of visible light a colour reflects, from 0 for pure black to 100 for pure white. It is the same relative luminance calculation used for screen contrast: saturated red measures about 21 and saturated green about 72. A wall below LRV 40 will noticeably darken a room and needs more lamps to compensate.
It splits a scheme by how much of the room each colour covers: about 60% for the dominant colour (usually the walls), 30% for a secondary (large furniture, curtains, a rug) and 10% for an accent (cushions, art, one painted element). Keeping the proportions makes even a bold accent feel deliberate rather than loud.
No — treat it as a starting point. Screens differ in calibration, and paint changes character with the light in your room, the sheen of the finish and the colours already there. Buy a sample pot, paint a large patch or a board, and look at it in morning, afternoon and lamplight before ordering.