The colors on one strip are very close to each other, differing in LRV (light reflective value) but I have seen some strips where one or more of the colors looks a little off.

If you desire a monochromatic color scheme, you'd be pretty safe in choosing from the different colors on one color strip. Other than that, a fan deck doesn't necessarily help you find good color combinations except that you can pull two or more strips out and compare them with each other to see if you like them together.

Both BM and SW as well as Behr and other major paint companies offer lots of help in coordinating colors. There are pre-selected palettes to choose from. Our local SW store even has a color consultant who will come out to your home and suggest color schemes or you could take a painting or a fabric swatch in to them and they would recommend some color choices for those. Also the BM and SW websites have color visualizers where you can choose a picture of a room and "paint" it any color you want. So if you see a color on the fan deck you think you like, pick a room and paint it with that color.

For a contrasting color scheme, colors opposite from each other on the color wheel are safe choices (reds and greens, blues and yellows, e.g.).

Also I think a good rule of thumb is to choose a color scheme on the walls throughout your house with colors that are close to the same in LRV. It doesn't flow as well to have one room in a light pastel and the next in a deep rich shade. A variance of this might be in a dining room, guest powder room or master bedroom where you might like a darker, more dramatic color.

Something else interesting to do is to ask at your BM or SW store which colors are currently the most popular. I recently asked that at my SW store and they said that about 20% of the paint the sell on a given day is from the paint strips having the colors Whole Wheat and Blonde. Information like that gives you a starting point as to what works best for most people.

Ask yourself what colors you like and are drawn to. I like beiges with a caramel tone, sage greens and blues with just a hint of aqua in them. For a color accent, I like a brick red color. My favorite wood is cherry and we have a lot of cherry cabinets and furniture, so I'm drawn toward colors that compliment the caramel tones in the wood.

For more ideas, post your question over at the Home Decorating Site. I'm sure you'll get lots of feedback. My suggestion would be to make the title of your question - How does a fan deck help you choose a color scheme? (or something like that).

thank you soooo much. you were very helpful. i will also post on the decorating site, but your info was wonderful. again..thanks.

LRV a.k.a. luminous reflectance factor deals strictly with how much light the color absorbs and how much is reflected. LRV is measured with equipment and it is a separate *part* of color from visual lightness and darkness a.k.a. gray scale or nuance.

Colors that are close in LRV can vary dramatically when compared by nuance. Meaning similar LRV numbers are no guarantee for pleasing color harmonies or relationships. LRV is specific to just color value (how light/how dark); it addresses just that one part of color and tells you nothing about a color's intensity (tone/nuance/dullness/brightness).

The color fan decks are not arranged in any order to facilitate color selection. They are logically ordered and organized for ease of reference for paint manufacturers and color mixers and not for coordination or harmonies. I think a lot of people think they can "go one strip over" or "always go one up on the strip" and it actually means something. It doesn't. There are no hidden secrets or clever tips to using a fandeck.

Here's more info on LRV.

Here is a link that might be useful: LRV how to use it and what it means

For real? I expected that the fan deck helps you to choose a color that has a specific saturation and a specific coolness/warmness and then, remembering the color wheel, choose a color that complements (opposite on color wheel) and choose a similar saturation or not and similar coolness/warmness....and pull off certain looks by doing so.

I expected that the fan deck helps you to choose a color that has a specific saturation and a specific coolness/warmness

Nope. Fandecks aren't a color system. Meaning the colors aren't put in order according to measurable color appearance attributes which are hue, value, chroma and LRV.

Most of them are decades old. Benjamin Moore Color Preview, for example, is pushing 50 years old at this point.

Benjamin Moore's Classic Colors fandeck is another good example. The colors were arranged by hand/eye according to the person who was the color marketing director at the time. Nothing scientific. Just one person's opinion.

Today, there are computer programs that sort - and order - paint color collections by their color DNA values. However, updating color collections and fandecks is a huge and expensive endeavor. Which is one of the reasons we're all still using fandecks organized with antiquated methods.

The Ben Moore Color Preview fandeck is more organized; the colors on the strips are intentional steps from darker up to lighter. The formula was adjusted to create strings of let down colors and that's what you see on the strips.

Keep in mind that formula steps do not always translate to perceptually uniform steps. What it is in terms of formula and what it ends up looking like can often be two different things. For example, there's no guarantee all the colors on the Color Preview fandeck strips belong to the same hue family.

Kelly Moore used to design their stores/displays using their color's Munsell notations. I think they still do. But the fandeck isn't ordered by Munsell.

If you can get your hands on a Dunn-Edwards architectural kit, it's truly a Master Class in how paint companies should do fandecks and color collections in general. Munsell notations are included in the fandeck's index and the arch kit spiral-bound atlas quantifies each color's light/dark relationship to the color above and below on the strip. Again, Dunn-Edwards color strips aren't guaranteed colors from the same hue family.

When the goal is to have strip chips of dark up to light colors, it's not always possible to fill the strips with colors that all belong to the exact same hue family. Likewise, if you want to fill a strip with paint colors from the exact same hue family, you're not going to get a strip of colors with neat and tidy steps of dark up to light.