Colour or monochrome? Always a tough decision, but sometimes you don’t need to make that call – you can have a bit of both. Colour-popping – the retention of colour saturation in one part of a monochrome image – is becoming more and more popular.
Traditionally, the colour-pop effect could only be applied when using an image editor that supported multiple image layers, such as Photoshop Elements. Recently, a number of colour-popping specialist apps, particularly on touch-screen devices, have emerged, and the newest kid on the block is Color Splash Studio (at the reduced price of $1.99/£1.49 at the time of writing), from Macphun (makers of the previously reviewed FX Photo Studio).
Like FX Photo Studio, Color Splash Studio has a sleek interface, and is a swift operator. Drag & drop your image into the app, and you’re ready to start painting in colour. The opacity, size and hardness of the colour-painting brush can be adjusted, and painting is seemingly not as fiddly as in some apps – this may have something to do with the unobtrusive brush cursor. Additionally, both the painted and non-painted layer are adjustable in their colour, contrast, exposure etc. Via these adjustment sliders, it’s possible to make a subtle colour-pop effect, where non-painted areas are just slightly desaturated, rather than being converted to monochrome – producing an effect that is less “in-your-face.”
Like with FX Photo Studio Pro, I can only praise Macphun for the build quality of Color Splash Studio – from the beautiful interface, to the ease of use and results. Add to this the support for huge resolution files (up to 32MP), many file types (including RAW) and integration with online services and Aperture/iPhoto, and you have a well-polished product.
Of course, it must be said that Color Splash Studio is a one-trick pony – and the one trick it does perform is not that difficult to perform in the world’s top-selling photo editing application. Having said this, when I next come to use the colour-pop technique, it will be Color Splash Studio that will be assigned the task.
