My buddy Don Giannatti said one time that one of the best ways for a photographer to be inspired is to pick up an iPhone and take pictures of everything and anything you see. I tend to agree with him. Since I switched to my iPhone4 from a Blackberry I have taken pictures like crazy. Partly due to the fact that I have a “good” camera with me all of the time, and partly due to the fact that I can do so much with the pictures right inside of the phone when I’m done with great apps like Color Splash. I’ve never been a huge fan of selective coloring, but I have to admit from time to time I like to do a little bit of it. Enter Color Splash. I downloaded this app mainly out of curiosity because it always seemed to be at the top of the Photography category in the app store, but I have to tell you that I love it! This app does everything that I expected, and it does it really well.
Ease of use
After watching the quick tutorial in the help section I was off and running. When you first open the application it gives you the option of taking or loading your picture. I find this a little redundant but it doesn’t get in the way so it’s really not a problem. Once your image is loaded Color Splash automatically converts it to black and white for you and puts you in color or paint back mode. You use two fingers to zoom in to the area that you wish to fill color back into. Painting is as easy as swiping your finger over the area you wish to return color to. To make this process easier and more accurate the application allows you to zoom in almost to pixel level. There are a few handy icons at the bottom of the screen that really make this app a breeze to use. If you return color to an area that you didn’t mean to, you can select the grey icon to remove the unwanted color. Also there is a pan & zoom icon that allows you to move your way around the image with one finger instead of the two finger method that you have to use while you have the color icon selected. There are two different methods of selective coloring that I would describe as different opacities. The first is full on 100% color return with each swipe of the finger. The second is somewhere in the neighborhood of 40% return with each swipe. Each method offers both a hard edge brush and a soft edge brush. You cannot adjust the hardness or softness but hey this is a mobile app, if you want that kind of control it’s probably best to load the image into Photoshop anyway.
Sharing
There are a few options for sharing your images when you are finished working on them. You can upload to Flickr, Twitter, or Facebook. You can also copy the image to the clipboard or email it. Of course you can save it to your camera roll as well.
Slight improvement
There is really only one thing that I would like to see changed or updated in this app, and it’s just a little thing. When you turn your screen horizontal the image transitions to match, the tool icons however do not. They stay in a vertical orientation. I would like to see the color, grey, and pan & zoom icons at the bottom of the screen in both orientations (told ya it was a small thing).
You can get Color Splash for the iPhone for $.99 here from the 
There is also an iPad app that functions essentially the same for $1.99 here on the
