Sometimes an app comes along that makes you have hope for the App Store. True, for every one of those, there are ten fart, girlie, jiggle, bodily function apps, but we take what we can get. For me, of late, one of these great hopes is ColorSplash by Hendrick Kueck. ColorSplash takes any picture you load into the app and turns it to black and white. But then the cool part of ColorSplash is that it allows you to restore color back to any part of that picture. Upon loading, you’ll see your image, either one you’ve taken with your iPhone’s camera or one you’ve loaded (it can be used on the iPod Touch as well), turn to black and white. A colorless world until you  let the color back into the picture, as much or as little as you like. The correct term for this is “selective desaturation” but Color Splash sure sounds like, and is, a lot more fun.

To color, just zoom, pick your brush (one of four: hard or soft edged, opaque or transparent) and let the color in. There’s an optional brush size slider but you have to enable that from the Settings section of your device.This brush size slider was implemented in the latest update and, as you can see below in the video the developer made about the update, if you use a small brush size, your finger can really block what you’re doing so zooming in on the image and using the normal brush size to restore color makes more sense.

Not being the most artistic in the world, maybe one of my favorite buttons in the app is the undo button. If you make a mistake, you can use undo repeatedly or you can choose gray and “regray” the part of the picture you mistakenly let the color back into. And did I mention that it is only $1.99? What a steal.

The good: Original, easy to use, addictive, fun, great price, and makes me feel all artistic.
The bad: Um, let’s see. Nope. I honestly can’t find anything bad to say about this app.
The bottom line: What are you waiting for? Buy it!

Download ColorSplash from the App Store