Allow us to paint you a picture. You’re surfing the internet and you spot a photo you love on one of your favourite sites. The colours are perfect. They’re exactly what you want. But how do you get them? The answer is Chip It! by Sherwin-Williams.

Chip It! is a first-of-its-kind bookmark tool that has the power to instantly transform any picture, on any website, into a palette pulled from more than 1,500 Sherwin-Williams paint colours. It saves the image and the colours together in a ChipCard so you can share and revisit them when you’re ready to paint.

Chip It! was born when our team noticed how many Pinterest users were pinning colourful pictures with no easy way of putting that inspiration to use in their homes. Chip It! was created specifically to bridge that gap.

Chip It! analyses every pixel in a picture and compares each to one of more than 1,500 Sherwin-Williams paint colours. It uses an algorithm to find the most prominent colours and composites the top 10 into a ChipCard.

Chip It! launched via letschipit.com February 1, 2012. Sherwin-Williams has spread the word about the tool through Facebook, direct mail and customer emails. A PR effort is earning Chip It! endorsements from the design community online and in print publications.

The best indicator of success is from Chip It! users themselves. One fan on apartmenttherapy.com said, “I'm hooked – I-can't-look-up-from-my-computer kind of hooked. This is going to be a very. big. problem.”Just 7 weeks since Chip It! launched, letschipit.com has had more than 130,000 unique visitors, more than 80,000 ChipCards have been created, and 3,000 ChipCards and counting have been pinned on Pinterest (not including repins). Consumer reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, and the tool has been featured on numerous design sites and blogs including Huffington Post’s Stylelist, Apartment Therapy, One Kings Lane and This Old House.