In these days of bloated apps that try to do everything, it's rare to find an app that takes the advice of Jack Palance in City Slickers: "One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean s—." Color Splash does just that. The app has a single-purpose: creating a striking image by converting a photo to black and white and letting the user paint back color in selected spots. It's a small feature, but it's a pretty popular one. As of this writing, Color Splash is the third-most-purchased among the 27,000 paid apps offered at the iPhone App Store.

When you open an image in Color Splash, it's displayed in black and white. You use your finger to "finger-paint" the color back into the photo. To make sure you add color only where you want it, you can zoom in with multitouch. The interface could use a little work, though; it's hard not to paint color back in when you're trying to zoom. The Pan & Zoom mode helps you avoid these unwanted color splotches, however, and the Undo arrow can eliminate any unwanted color additions. If that's not exact enough, you can return just selected sections to black and white by repainting them, using another setting. And don't worry too much about making mistakes: Color Splash's editing is non-destructive. A copy of your original is saved before you start monkeying with it.

Your paintbrush can be modified to a hard or soft edge, and it can either be opaque or transparent. The last option lets you add a more subtle colorized effect. If the effect is too subtle to see on-screen, you can display your finger-painted areas as bright red, leaving no doubt as to where you painted color. All this control meant my results turned out just as advertised on the iTunes Store page for the app.

When you leave the app and return to a project, though you're not taken directly to the photo you were last working on, a Resume Session choice gets you there quickly enough. You can be working on multiple photos, all of which the app will save.—Next: Drawbacks

Drawbacks

A couple of things are missing from the app that I think would make it better. The main one is the ability to pump up the color of a photo before it's converted to black and white. Photos where the colors aren't saturated enough before conversion aren't well suited to editing in Color Splash. Basic brightness and contrast controls would help, too, for the same reasons. Of course, you could do either of these operations in another image editing app, but why not save us the step?

Another kvetch of mine is that you can't use Color Splash to filter the black-and-white image to emphasize certain colors, as you can in Photo fx and most image editors that convert to black and white. I realize that Color Splash isn't a full image editor, but the capability would be a natural extension of a program that puts such emphasis on black and white.

There's no sending or sharing online of your modified photos in Color Splash, but you can go back to your iPhone's Camera Roll and e-mail them from there. You cannot save Color Splash pictures to Camera Roll at full 1,600-by-1,200 resolution: The image gets downsized to 768-by-1,024. That's a no-no in my book.

Color Splash does a decent job of what it sets out to do: creating striking photos that highlight spots by making them the only areas of color. Its interface, with multitouch support, is perfectly suited to this restricted task. Given its limited functionality and the few beefs I detail above, however, I think a price of 99 cents would be more reasonable than $1.99.

[App Store link: Color Splash]

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