Do you need ideas for color schemes for painting the walls and ceilings of your living room?

You may hire a  home decor expert for suggestions but for more unique and fresh color combinations, go to Flickr where you will find photographs of real living rooms, kitchen, bathrooms and the kids room from homes across the globe.

You can search for living room photos directly on Flickr.com website or use an external search sites like PictureSandbox and Compfight that generally display more Flickr photos per page.

Once you shortlist images that have appealing color schemes, download them your to hard-drive and head over to kuler.com - an online color scheme generator from Adobe.

You upload images to Kuler and it will automatically create a palette for you by extracting the various colors used in that photograph. Or you can manually move the dots over the photograph to pick colors from any portion of the image yourself.

For instance, in the the image above, I used Kuler to extract colors from a green Vista Wallpaper that could make a good exterior paint color scheme.

An alternative color generator is available at akelos.com which does search on Flickr and also extracts the color schemes from photos in one step. For more ideas, read this guide on how to decide color scheme for your home.

Now the colors on your computer screen will always appear different from the actual paint colors but the guys at the local paint store can always help you here.

Here’s a picture of a playhouse that we have at home - the color scheme here is inspired by a photo from Flickr.