Here's a creative exercise for you, especially helpful if you're trying to decorate a room and you've narrowed down your color choices but cannot make a final decision, or if you have no clue what colors to even start with. Train your eye and develop a stronger color sense (and sharpen your direction) by using a digital camera. When you're out and about, take photos of color combinations that you like, for instance a pattern you see in a clothing store or a painting in the lobby of a hotel. Capture things you like without concentrating on what you're photographing -- that's not important. Color is what you're after here. Whether it's the top of a building or the carpet in a waiting room. You can even set up a home photo shoot and experiment using fabric, clothing, art, dishware, magazines, photographing current items in your home that you really love. A good start is your closet and accessories like jewelry and handbags. The only rule is to make sure that everything you're photographing has colors that you love. Now for the next step...

Example: A purple color folder where I quickly noticed a trend. I like purple when it's more of a pastel paired with soft green. I also like lilac paired with gray and silver.

Okay, so you're snapping photos like crazy, now what? You'll need to store them in a place where you can easily view them all together and create folders to organize your color groups. I highly suggest using a free photo management site like Flickr to upload them. In Flickr, you can arrange your photos into sets, or folders according to color. Title your sets accordingly, "purple", "white", "green", etc. Try this experiment for a few solid weeks so that you have enough photos to make a solid decision. Spot a trend? Maybe your green folder is nearly empty but your reds are overflowing. Now look at your reds. Do you see a trend there? Not all red is created equal, nor any color for that matter. Perhaps you'll see that you have a strong leaning towards a tone of red you currently aren't using in your home. It's time to change that because you should be living around color you love and are naturally drawn to, right? Makes sense to me.

Over time, you'll not only build a fantastic image collection, but again -- you'll start to see a pattern in what colors dazzle you the most AND what combinations of colors (color schemes) that you like.

Group images into folders on sites like Flickr, for instance.

Example: A green color folder. I learned from my study that I tend to lean towards either kelly green paired with crisp white and chartreuse.

Outside of learning more about yourself and what you like, building an online color portfolio is just plain fun because it's on the web so you can access it from anywhere and share it with others, including fellow Flickr users or the decorator that you're working with (decorators and designers will love you for this, trust me!). Of course, you can arrange things however you'd like in your folders, this is merely a suggestion based on my own experience, but I think it's a great way to boost your color confidence and make new discoveries.

One last bit: I've experimented with Flickr, Photobucket, and Shutterfly and Flickr always comes out on top for me. Do you have an online photo management and sharing application that you can suggest as an alternative in case someone reading is not keen on Flickr? Thank you!

images: holly becker for real simple.