Android App Review: Color Splash FX
Color Splash FX is a fun novelty app that lets you recolour your photos with pretty results. However, its eagerness to get information from your phone and push you to buy more apps makes me hesitant to recommend it.
Color Splash works similarly to quite a few other apps out there. Using your finger, you can either add or remove colour from a photo.
The app description offers fun suggestions like “Gray out everything in your photo except your face!” “Make your hair green” or “Paint a flag over your face” – at least two of which can be achieved in real life, without using your phone, which is presumably why they weren’t given exclamation marks.
You can finger paint over the image, either desaturating it, resaturating it, or colouring it a particular hue. You can, indeed, make your hair green if you wish.
There’s something oddly satisfying about swiping your finger over a grayscale image and seeing it rejuvenated by your touch.
Adding a selected colour can tend to blow out the image a bit though, to the point where a face that was totally recognisable in black and white becomes a glowing blob when you try to make it orange. With practice and good source photographs it’s probably possible to get around limitation like that, though.
Color Splash has other features like X-Ray or Blur (think the filters menu in Photoshop) – some of which are immediately available, some of which it tells you that you can unlock for free.
However, selecting this option takes you to a screen that lets you either buy the features, or get them for free if you download other apps from (presumably) the same producers. While I guess that counts as free, technically, it’s the kind of manipulation that leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
It’s also worth noting that Norton Mobile Security considers this app to be a ‘Privacy Offender’ of High Concern because it collects a list of your installed apps, SIM card details, and personal account details.
If this bothers you (and it’s totally reasonable if it does) then you might decide that unjustified intrusions into your privacy are too high a price to pay for the ability to clumsily recolour your photos.
Maybe there’s nothing sinister about Color Splash FX, and individually all these things can be explained away pretty innocently.
As a photo colouring app it works fine, and if that’s all you’re interested in then give it a go. If Norton’s warning worries you though, then perhaps see what other options are out there first.
