Review: ColorSplash

Overview ColorSplash is a photo editor app that allows you to adjust the saturation of your photos. You can select which parts of the photo you want to turn to black and white (or keep color if you want to do it that way), by tracing your finger on the screen. You can make your boring old photos into less boring “arty” photos!

Features

• Edit That Photo!

You can start and save multiple sessions on the photos. So if you get bored of the photo you’re editing, you can start a new one any time, and save that as well. There are four brush options to choose from, each providing a different effect. There’s a soft and hard brush, opaque and transparent. You can zoom and pan and work in both portrait and landscape mode.

You can switch between normal view mode and an alternate view that shows all the colored portions of your photo as bright red. You might think, why the hell would they do that? I thought the same thing myself. It’s because it helps you to clearly see the boundary between color and black and white. You can zoom in and adjust those boundaries to make them look as smooth as possible.

• Shortcuts!

Just like in Photoshop, there are some “keyboard” shortcuts to take advantage of. If you do a single tap, it hides the tool bars to give you a full screen view. Double tapping will switch between color and gray mode. If you’re in full screen mode, this is a good shortcut to know. A two finger tap will fit the image to the screen, so if you’re zoomed in or out- it’ll make it the correct size. Isn’t technology awesome?!

Breakdown

The Good: Okay, I’ll admit when I first downloaded this app my expectations were pretty low. There were two things that I was concerned about. The first, do I really care about adding black and white effects to my crummy photos taken from my iPhone camera? The second, how well would the photos actually come out? (Psst, the answers are “no” and “not bad.”) Tracing on the screen with my big dumb finger seemed like a nightmare waiting to happen. I figured the photos were going to come out like the coloring books always did when I was five. Fortunately, you can zoom far in, which allows you to reach the level of detail that you so desire. And honestly, what would the photos be without precise detail? (Psst, the answer is crappy.) I liked how easy it all worked. The alternate view helped in those tricky areas where the color was trying to disguise itself as black and white. And thankfully, there’s an undo button, because you’re bound to screw up a few times. The shortcuts come in handy too- zooming and “painting.” The photo you see was about as artful as I was willing to get. I think it’s nifty. And it reminds me of a place I love. If you’ve never been to In N Out, I pity you. The Bad: Two things. First, I wish there were more editing options. (Photoshop hath spoiled me.) If they want to stick with the saturation thing, the least they could do is have an option to adjust the saturation, like a sliding scale. It’s nice to be able to mute the colors to a level very close to black and white. They’re desaturated, but you can still see a bit of the color. With this app, it’s all or nothing. I want middle ground! I want shades of gray! I’m also not sure how much use I’m going to get out of this app. The pictures taken on the iPhone are garbage- and I don’t really want to spend any of my time editing these pictures on my phone when I have a superior program with far better accuracy on my computer. So, that’s a bummer. I can’t say it’s the app’s fault or anything though. It tries hard to be fun. And it is. But it’s no Photoshop.

Verdict

While I don’t have any use for this app myself, I can see people enjoying this a lot. Me? I’m going to stick with Photoshop. It offers a lot more- and the pictures I’d edit wouldn’t be taken from the crappy camera in that phone. But if you really like the quality of photos taken from your iPhone and you’d like to do some fun saturation effects- then you’re gonna wanna pick this up. Especially if you don’t have Photoshop- or any other photo editing software. But considering what it's supposed to do... it does it very well. I'm feeling generous...

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