In a smartphone market inundated by photo and/or image manipulation apps, few really stand out. It’s more ‘follow the leader’ than ‘be more different or innovative’. On the iPhone for instance, there are plenty of options as far as alternative photo-editing apps are concerned. These apps not only allow the user to take photos using the iPhone’s brilliant camera, but enhance the experience of photography by providing editing options. In short, these apps combine photo-taking and photo-editing into one package.
With the phenomenal growth of the smartphone and tablet market, virtually everyone is now either in possession, or coming in contact with a smart device like the iPhone or an iPad,and I genuinely feel there is a huge market out there for apps which let you edit images on-the-go.
PHOTO SPLASH FX
Photo Splash FX is an app which attempts to set itself apart from all the others. It’s an excellent attempt by Master Minds, the studio responsible for developing it.
At the time of writing, the app exists on two platforms –the iOS (support for both iPhone and the iPad), and one for Windows Phone 7 (WP7).

This review is based on my experience with the app on the iOS. Version 1.1 (the latest one at time of writing) can be downloaded right off iTunes. It’s a comparatively small download, at just 3.9 MB. I’ve also been informed that version 1.2 is also just around the corner which promises a lot of improvements. But nonetheless, let’s now see what this app is capable of.
THE INTERFACE
Upon loading the app, the user is greeted by a black canvas which has the app and the developer’s name. There is a scrollable menu on the bottom, with plenty of options that we will get to in this review. An information icon sits in the top-left of the app.
The interface, as you might’ve imagined, is minimalistic and offers its user a completely no-frills experience, yet it’s very clean and well-designed. The thing that really impressed me about it was how quick it loaded up – an extremely important quality when you want to touch-up an image and share it with your friends quickly.
LOADING AN IMAGE
And that quality of the app doesn’t end there. Throughout my experience with it, I found the app to be quick in whatever I did on it. The images load up quickly and any editing options you choose are applied in the blink of an eye. All signs point toward it being a very well-coded app.
There are plenty of editing options to choose from. But before you do that, you need to load an image onto the app’s canvas. There are multiple ways to go about this. The ‘Load’ option allows you to use the iPhone’s camera to take a picture for further editing, or load an image from the library (for example from the iPhone’s camera roll). Then there’s a button which says ‘Pasteboard’ and this nifty little feature allows you to load an image from the iPhone’s clipboard onto the app’s canvas. This could be an image that was, for instance, copied from a webpage in the browser, or from an app. Either way, you can take any image that you might’ve copied earlier and put it on the app’s canvas using this option.

Like previously mentioned, the process of loading an image and putting it on the canvas for further editing is quick, regardless of which option you choose.
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