Aquarella — instant watercolor
The famous blue-lipsticked Aquarella woman
Aquarella is one of a series of art apps by JixiPix software. It first appeared on 21 January 2013. It runs on iPhone, iPad and even Apple Vision.
This is another one for importing an image and applying an effect, which as you can tell from my post title is a watercolor style. No brushing or masking is available but there are a number of parameters you can change to achieve your desired level of wateriness.
When you first open the app you are presented with a blank gray canvas and the only button besides opening the manual is to import an image with the Get Photo button. You are asked to grant access to the Photo library but the dialog box says it isn’t necessary.
Once you’ve imported your first image, a default style is applied.
Now you have an image, more buttons are revealed. You have Home, Presets, Detail, Wash and Bloom.
Presets has two subsections, Aquarella and Two Tone with 32 and 28 styles respectively. There are no In-App Purchases available, but considering the other controls there is a lot of variation to be found under the hood.
The common dice icon you can see in the top right is of course for randomization if you need a little inspiration or don’t know what direction you want to head in. There’s also an undo button with a single level of undo.
The last button in the toolbar is a press-and-hold button for comparing your original imported image.
The Detail section lets you drag sliders for Color Detail, Enhance Colors, Wet Edge Strength and Wet Edge Detail. It’s not live but the rendering is quite quick because it works on your thumbnail.
Wash lets you choose seven paper styles and two more sliders for Wash Strength and Color Shift. There is another button here for choosing one of 63 washes.
Bloom lets you choose Normal or Inverse, then another slider for the strength and a button to choose from 41 bloom styles. So there’s lots to play with.
Top of MU Tower in Simulated Watercolor (2015)
Jason Cutler
Don’t be discouraged by the inital import
You can zoom in on your image with the standard pinch-to-zoom controls. Once you’re happy with the results, you go back to Home to get a save to Camera Roll option or a Share button behind which is a menu to get to the iOS Share Sheet if you want to send directly to another app or Airdrop it perhaps. You can also save your Preset and it keeps the thumbnail from the image you were working on, which is a nice touch. You can favorite your presets but you can’t share them with other Aquarella users.
These apps tend to work better on photographs rather than graphic images, but you can see how the Wet Edge allows simulating color seeping into the virtual paper.
One nice thing about the JixiPix offerings is they have a standard user interface, so if you collect more of their apps you already know your way around. Just like the Two Steves and the rest of the early Macintosh team wanted!
The Stars Like Dust (2013)
Jason Cutler
Final Thoughts
For about $8 AUD with no IAPs, no ads and an easy to use interface, this is a good purchase. After 11 years in the App Store you’ll see there are now lots of watercolor apps some of which have tried to piggyback on this one’s success by using a similar name. If you need more examples, check them out on Flickr. If you want to do the same effect on a desktop computer, they also make it for Mac and Windows.
Enjoy watering your images!