ColorBlast! is a selective colour painting app developed by two ex-Adobe engineers, but don ‘t worry: this isn ‘t one of those cases where the developers’ name dropping is the most exciting thing behind the app. ColorBlast! really can work like magic, and it’s hands-down the easiest ways to create a dramatic grey scale image […]
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Review: ColorBlast! for iPhone

Aug 4th 2010 by

image taken with permission from The Travelling Isle travel blog

ColorBlast! is a selective colour painting app developed by two ex-Adobe engineers, but don ‘t worry: this isn ‘t one of those cases where the developers’ name dropping is the most exciting thing behind the app. ColorBlast! really can work like magic, and it’s hands-down the easiest ways to create a dramatic grey scale image with a punch of colour right on your iPhone.

man on bull thing in front of a greyscale Eiffel Tower
man on bull thing in front of a greyscale Eiffel Tower


[I Am Canadian: you may notice that I spell ‘color ‘ with a ‘u ‘ in this article, but still spell the app as ‘ColorBlast! ‘. These are not typos or inconsistencies, I am just Canadian.]

Selective Colouring
Before I expound on the magic of ColorBlasting (which is very different from Bear Blasting, by the way), it ‘s probably important for me to mention what the process is like in other iPhone apps.

Pocket Pixels ‘ Color Splash has been near or at the top of the Photography category of the App Store for as long as I can remember, and although I ‘ve never used it, its description shows that it basically ‘paints ‘ colour onto greyscale images. I ‘ve accomplished this same effect using Photoforge on the iPhone, although it does require a little more effort. Essentially, it boils down to adding a greyscale filter to a coloured photograph, and then selectively erasing certain areas that you want to see in colour.
The problem is that this can be a massive pain in the app when you encounter curves or slivers of colour. It involves a lot of brushing and erasing to get the effect just right.

ColorBlast! and the magical paintbrushes
ColorBlast ‘s innovation lies with its smart paintbrushes. You can still use a paint roller and eraser as in other apps, but the two smart brushes ” one is big, and the other is less big ” are your reason for buying ColorBlast!. Here’s how the developers show off the app:

Using either of the smart brushes on an a particular area will paint only that particular colour onto the image, for as long as you keep your finger on the screen.

This means that your very theoretical and very artistic picture of an apple lying on a bed of broccoli should be a piece of cake in ColorBlast! (not literally, of course ” this isn ‘t that kind of image manipulation).

Images can be imported from your iPhone albums or camera, Facebook account, and even your clipboard. Once imported, the images are immediately converted to grey scale and await your magic touch.

Painting colour into well-lit images is ridiculously easy and really does work as advertised, but playing with more dramatic, shadowy shots, will probably require you to zoom in to manually paint and erase.

This is especially true in the instances where the magic brushes bleed other colours onto an area you were painting. This is probably unavoidable when you consider how complicated all of these colour calculations must be, but the app would be significantly easier to use if it were to show you how big your brush really is (a simple white outline for the brush would be wonderful).

If you want to touch things up a bit more, you can change the tint and exposure level of coloured areas, basic background tint (sepia looks great!), or even scale the colour saturation of the entire image, which allows for vivid patches of colour laid over an otherwise normal looking image. Should you make a mistake, there are convenient, undo and redo buttons right at the top of the screen.

Once an image has been blasted with a suitable amount of colour, it can be exported to Facebook, e-mail, SMS, or your iPhone photo library. Twitter is noticeably absent as an export option, but there are so many Twitter apps to support that I don ‘t really blame the devs for not picking a side.

Conclusion
ColorBlast! isn ‘t perfect, but it ‘s a lot of fun to use, especially when you know how irritating selective colouring can be without specialized tools. It ‘s definitely at the top of the pile of colour-based photo editing apps in my book, and if you ‘re interested in this kind of image manipulation, ColorBlast! is definitely the app to buy.
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ColorBlast! is available for $1.99 on the App Store.
The app was provided by East Coast Pixels for review on Just Another iPhone Blog. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.

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