I don’t do a whole lot of image editing on the iPad, and even less selective coloring. With the lack of camera, there is rarely an image that enters my iPad that hasn’t been retouched already so I really don’t download a whole lot of iPad image editing Apps. Photo Delight is different. It has one cool little feature that really makes it useful; with Photo Delight you can download any image from any of your Facebook friend’s albums, this is a little something different that makes it really fun to use.
 

A Word about the UI

I am all about easy to use, well thought out user interfaces. Photo Delight is both. From the time you launch the App to the moment you save, share, or print your image the interface has been designed with ease of use as the primary concern. There are two ways to load images to the workspace. You either load them from one of your albums, or use the Facebook interface to load either an image from your Facebook profile, or from any of your friend’s Facebook photo albums. This is a really great feature, and the first time I’ve seen an image editing App give you the ability to load your friends pictures from Facebook. I hope all of the other editing Apps are reading this and taking note.

Like the other quality selective color Apps that I have tried out, Photo Delight desaturates the image initially and you “paint” the color back where you want it. Also just like most of the quality selective coloring Apps, Photo Delight allows you to select the opacity of the area that you are repainting. It also allows for brush size adjustment, hard or soft edged brushes, and an eraser option if you paint an area that you didn’t intend on painting. Another great feature that I’m glad they included is the ability to zoom in to near pixel level to select your areas. Using two fingers just as you do in most other places on the iPad, pinching zooms in and out of photos. This allows precision for when you are in normal brush mode. To be honest though, I hardly ever go into normal brush mode, I am almost exclusively in the mode that makes this a “Best App” for me; Smart Brush mode. For anyone familiar with the way that Auto Mask works in Photoshop Lightroom, you will feel right at home with the Smart Brush in Photo Delight. Selecting Smart Brush tells the App that the next color area that you select is the only color that you want to paint back as long as you don’t lift your finger off of the screen. Each time you lift your finger off of the screen and re touch the screen you select a new color range for your Smart Brush. This is an extremely helpful, and useful addition that really takes it to a new level in my opinion.

Once you’re done recoloring your images you have to decide what to do with them. As you would expect in almost any App designed for image manipulation on the iPad you can share via email, twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and of course save the image to your camera roll. The export feature that got my attention however was Air Print. Now I know that Air Print isn’t anything new, but it’s nice to be able to print your new selectively colored image to your wireless printer directly from your iPad. Most of the images that I will be selectively coloring on my iPad will be just for fun anyway, so being able to print a quick 4X6 or 5X7 is nice. 

In the end…

Selective coloring isn’t anything new to the iPad but the level of control that Photo Delight brings to the platform makes it stand out above other Apps of its kind. If I were to add anything to this App it would probably just be a couple of more editing tools but this is nit picking. If you want to do selective coloring on the iPad, this is the App to have.

Get Photo Delight for the iPad for $1.99 here from the iTunes