Color Portfolio

Review by eFreeware

Color Portfolio is a free Android app from Benjamin Moore Co., the paint manufacturer, filed under House & Home. It puts the company's color library on your phone and lets you preview those colors on images of your own rooms, so a paint decision can be made before anyone opens a can. That is the core appeal: seeing a shade in context rather than on a tiny paper chip.

The app has been available since January 2020 and sits at a 4.0 average from 5,004 ratings, with more than 500,000 installs. It is free, carries no ads and offers no in-app purchases, which makes it easy to try without weighing a subscription against a paint budget. The most recent update, in June 2026, refreshed the look and added new ways to sort shades, plan shopping around a project and see which colors sell best.

Built for anyone repainting a Benjamin Moore room

This is a tool for people who have already decided, or are close to deciding, that they will paint with Benjamin Moore products. If you are choosing between brands, the app's library is the manufacturer's own. If you are choosing between Benjamin Moore shades, it is exactly the right instrument.

The natural audience is homeowners and renters planning a single room or a whole house, plus interior designers and painters who specify colors for clients and want to show options quickly. It also suits anyone who has collected paint chips, magazine tears or fabric swatches and wants to see how a color behaves on a wall rather than in a hand.

Because the whole experience is built around the Benjamin Moore catalog, the value scales with how much of your project will use those paints. For a quick one-wall refresh it is a convenient second opinion; for a full renovation with several rooms and finishes, the ability to keep browsing and previewing in one place matters more.

The virtual fan deck replaces the paper one

The virtual fan deck is the simplest part of the app and probably the one you will open most. It lets you scroll through Benjamin Moore's collections, including Color Preview, Benjamin Moore Classics, Affinity, the Historical Collection, Off-Whites and Designer Classics. Instead of carrying a physical fan deck around a store or a job site, you have the same library on your phone.

Browsing by family is useful when you know you want a green but not which green; shopping by project is useful when you know the room but not the palette. The navigation is intuitive, and the structure suggests the developer has put effort into making a big library feel less overwhelming.

For anyone who has flipped through a fan deck and lost track of which shade was which, having the collections organized and searchable on a phone is a genuine improvement over paper. It is also the feature that works regardless of whether you ever point a camera at a wall.

Trying colors on your own photos

The photo visualizer is where the app moves from reference tool to planning tool. You take a photo of a room and then try colors on it by tapping a surface, which the app masks instantly so the paint lands on the wall rather than on the furniture. If you do not have a suitable photo to hand, you can work from images in the app's inspiration gallery instead.

The instant masking is the part that matters. Painting a color onto a photo is only useful if the edges hold, and tapping a surface to select it is a much faster way to get there than tracing a wall by hand. The result is a preview you can judge, adjust and compare against another shade without repainting anything.

This is the feature I would expect to do the heavy lifting for most people. It answers the question a paint chip cannot: how does this color look next to my floor, my trim and the light coming through my window, in a room I actually live in.

Live color in the video visualizer

Benjamin Moore paint colors can be viewed on real surfaces through augmented reality. Rather than editing a still photo, you point your phone at the room and see the color applied as you move. That makes it possible to check a shade on more than one wall, or from more than one angle, without taking and editing a series of pictures.

Real-time application is the kind of feature that sounds impressive and can be genuinely useful when you are standing in the room trying to commit. It is also the feature most tied to the camera seeing the surfaces you want to change.

Between the photo and video visualizers, the app covers both the slow, considered comparison and the quick, in-the-moment check. Neither replaces a sample pot on the wall, but both narrow the field before you buy one.

Matching a real color with the ColorReader

Precision color matching is the app's most specialized capability, and it depends on hardware. Owners of a Datacolor ColorReader or ColorReader Pro can match a real-world color against the Benjamin Moore library. The device is sold separately; the app itself does not include it, and ordering information points to Datacolor.

That makes this a feature for a specific situation: you have a fabric, a tile, a piece of art or an existing paint you want to reproduce, and you want the closest Benjamin Moore equivalent. Without the device, the app still handles browsing and previewing.

It is worth being clear about the shape of that cost. The app is free, but the matching workflow requires a separate purchase from a different company, so the total price of using this feature is the price of the ColorReader plus whatever you pay for paint. If matching an existing color is your main goal, that device is part of the decision.

Free to use, with hardware sold separately

Color Portfolio costs nothing to download and use. The only money involved is the paint you eventually buy and, if you want precision matching, the ColorReader device.

That is an unusually clean arrangement for a manufacturer's app. Many brand apps exist to sell you something at every turn; this one is free, and the commercial relationship is simply that the colors come from one company's catalog. The trade-off is the catalog itself: the app is a Benjamin Moore tool, and its library reflects that.

For a household planning a paint project, the absence of ads and purchases keeps the experience focused on color. The cost question is settled before you open the app.

How it compares with other ways to choose paint

The obvious alternative is the physical fan deck, which costs nothing extra if you pick one up at a store. What the app adds is the ability to see colors on your own walls and to carry the whole library at once, which is hard to do with paper.

A second alternative is a general-purpose photo editor or a room-design app that lets you paint over images. Those can be flexible, but they typically do not come with a manufacturer's curated palette. Color Portfolio's advantage is that the color you preview is the color you can order.

A third route is buying sample pots and painting patches directly on the wall. That remains the most reliable test because it accounts for your actual light at different times of day. The app is best understood as the step before that: it gets you from dozens of candidates to a handful worth sampling.

A useful first stop for a Benjamin Moore project

Color Portfolio is a well-scoped free tool for one job: choosing and previewing Benjamin Moore paint colors. The virtual fan deck, photo visualizer and video visualizer cover the range from browsing to seeing a shade on your own surfaces, and the ColorReader adds real-world matching for anyone who buys the device.

I would point it at homeowners and renters planning a repaint, and at designers or painters who need to show Benjamin Moore options on the spot. If your project will use those paints, the app costs you nothing and saves a good deal of guesswork. If you are still deciding between brands, the catalog's single-manufacturer focus is the main thing to weigh.

The practical sequence I would suggest is to browse the collections, narrow to a few shades, check them on your own photos and in the live view, then buy samples of the finalists. The app will not settle the decision for you, but it will make the shortlist much shorter.

What's new in version 3.1.1

Discover a fresh, more vibrant look designed to inspire. Our improved features include the ability to explore colors by family, shop by project, and browse top-selling colors, all supported by intuitive navigation, aspirational imagery, and a seamless experience with benjaminmoore.com.