Recommend good home decorating software?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m looking for software that I can use to help us make some home decorating choices. (I am completely unable to picture what colour combinations, furniture placement, etc will look like - although once I see the finished product, I know exactly what I like and what isn’t working …)

Something which would allow us to upload digital pictures of our home, and allow us to manipulate the paint colours, cabinet colours, etc would be wonderful. A bonus would be the ability to somehow place / move furniture.

I’m sure such a beast exists, but I thought I would turn to the Dopers for recommendations …

Any ideas?

Thanks,
S.

2

Well, from what I can see on Amazon, there are some where you can create a design of your house, but none that let you work from pictures.

Here’s one:

Better Homes and Gardens Home Design 6.0

And another, which allows you to import scanned plans, but says nothing about pictures:

Punch Pro

I’d like to redesign our kitchen and knock down the wall to our mud room to make the kitchen bigger, so something like this software would be cool. If you find anything else, please post it, would you?

E.

3
      • If you want to play with colors, all you need is a scanner and a photo-editing program. Reduce the images to grayscale, promote them back to color and then “watercolor” in the pieces of the picture any way you want.
  • As far as “moving furniture around”, that would need 3-D modeling. Generally, the low-end “home remodeling” programs I have seen were more inclined towards remodeling the house structure itself than in placing things like furniture and decorations. The functionality of these things tends to be less than what you get if you buy a plain 3d CAD program, but the “advantage” of the “home remodeling” programs is that they attempt to include a bunch of prefab models you can use, for things like “generic furniture”. You can normally assign colors and patterns to objects, so you can for instance “cover” a wood-paneled door with “woodgrain texture”–but the results are typically not that great. And the included furniture models in the software may look nothing like what you own.
  • You can model your own furniture in the program as well, but in the time it would take to do that, you could probably just get off your rear and shove the real stuff around anyway. Constructing blocky shapes is easy in these programs, so doing a CAD model for a house remodeling (involving moving walls, windows, ect) makes sense–but doing things with complex curves tends to take up a lot of time.
    ~
4

I don’t know how good it is, as I’ve never used it, but there is 3D Home Decorating Software that allows you to draw in your room dimensions and then put in furniture and fabric/wall/window treatments. It would be their furniture, not yours, but you could probably find reasonable substitutes for the sorts of things you’ve got and at least see how colors and so forth are working together in the space you’ve got.