The app A Color Story, designed to brighten and enhance photos to a user’s preference, was released on Jan. 12. Photo obtained under fair use guidelines.
By ANA ALDRIDGE – Staff Writer
The women’s lifestyle company A Beautiful Mess released its third photo editing app, A Color Story, on Jan. 12. The app focuses on brightening and enhancing the natural color of photos.
Released on Jan. 12, A Color Story proves to be a viable competitor to other popular photo editing, apps such as Aviary, PicsArt, and VSCO. The app is the third photo editing app distributed by the women’s lifestyle company A Beautiful Mess. The app’s predecessors include Party Party and A Beautiful Mess. A Color Story is free on the iTunes App Store, and distributors say they are in the final stages of testing an Android-compatible version of the app.
The app is very appealing in a visual sense, full of color and intriguing photos that grab the user’s attention, and is likely this way to target a teenage audience. It includes a large variety of features, from simple cropping options to complex features like curving a photo’s contrast.
The feature that most separates A Color Story from its competitors is that through combining certain filters with lighting and color preferences, one can create and save their own, personalized filter.
A con of having so many features is that it’s easy to get lost in the vastness of filters and effects. Another negative part of the app is that it’s constantly promoting itself, asking for a rating and offering in-app purchases.
Despite these slight annoyances, the app does do its job at touching up photos. The filters aren’t the best because several seem to wash out photos, but the small fixes, like increasing saturation, are relatively effective.
Overall, the app is at least worth downloading for someone interested in editing photos. It may not be the best, but it does have some nice features, and the user can appreciate the app’s clean, colorful layout. However, if a user is looking for a sophisticated app with stronger editing software, they should stick with apps VSCO or PicsArt.
