Color Fashion Will Color You Pink (And That's a Good Thing)
Color Fashion ($0.99) by Reallusion Inc. is a new player in the photo manipulation game that promises to change the color of detailed items in photos. It uses smart edge technology that assists in differentiating between that which you want to modify and that which you don’t.
For anyone who has used Color Splash, the execution of Color Fashion is the same, but the purpose and result is a little different. Where Color Splash retains the color in certain objects while graying out the rest (or vice versa), Color Fashion instead tints the shade of color on anything while leaving the native color untouched on the rest of the picture. It is advertised as useful for seeing if your hair or articles of clothing would look better if rendered in a different shade, but it could really be used for any color changing purpose.
The first and most important task is to mask that which you want to be tinted. This tells the program what portions to change. You can pinch to zoom and erase the masking to get it pixel perfect. As mentioned above, if you can’t exactly mask every hair strand the smart edge feature will assist you. In my trials, this worked fairly well, but best when against a solid colored background.
As soon as you are satisfied with your masking, you head into the recoloring session where you can choose from 20 different shades. You can also adjust the lightness, strength and smoothness of the color. If you are happy with your change, you can keep it and continue changing additional areas.
You aren’t going to convince a photographic detective with the results, but overall the recoloring looked fantastic and I was honestly surprised at how well this process works.
One limitation I quickly found is that it works best with lighter colored objects, as my test picture contained a very handsome, but dark haired couple (engagement pictures of myself and my wife, thanks sweetie!). Still, as you can see, the end result looked quite natural and turned my wife into a rather convincing redhead and reaffirmed my conviction to never put bleach in my hair. It worked beyond just hair, as I easily gave my wife a dab of lipstick, and did a face paint number on myself.
One other small limitation is that you can’t use pictures larger than 3MB. This is easily circumvented, however, as you can just take a screen shot of your picture in photo mode (push the power and home buttons at the same time). This quick fix will resize your picture to a workable size. Professionals can resize pictures closer to the size limit with other software for better resolution.
What Color Fashion does, it does astonishingly well. For fans of Color Splash, those interested in fashion, or anyone who has wondered what they would look like with purple hair this is a must buy for $0.99.
