Coat color question

I'm looking to research colors some of the specific on coat color in poo's and am wondering if any of you have any good places to start. Specificly I want to know more about colors that fade, like the different variations between chocolate and cafe-au-lait, and Blue and Silver. I was surfing the web tonight blindly, just killing time, and ran across a breeder advertising Brown spoo puppies for sale. Her big sales picth was "won't fade". My question is how do you know? How can I look at a puppy without knowing it's genetic background and know what color it's planning on being? Is that even possible in poodles? I can look at a tibbie and tell you what color that puppy will be without question. But tibbies don't fade and change the same way poo's do. Do you just roll the dice so to speak in those cases. I'm obviously excluding the fact that the breeder would pressumably know what color mom and dad as well as there parents were and would know at least a little bit about the genetic involved with the colors. I want to know how (or IF) I can know what I'm looking at.

Hubby saw a picture of a red poodle the other day and is now leaning heavily on me to avoid getting another cream or white colored dog. He wants Silver/Blue, Chocolate, Red, or Black. I want to understand what that cute little *insert color here* puppy will look like when it's all grown up. I guess I'm a bad person but I am soo visual that I aside from health and temperment, color is very important to me.