Cool fx is a image-editing app by photo industry veterans The Tiffen Company. In its App Store description, Cool fx promises to simulate different colour and black-and-white photographic looks, diffusion, motion picture and film stocks, and optical lab processes. It certainly delivers on that promise –perhaps too much so for some users.

Cool fx functions very simply while giving you a large range of options. As soon as the app launches, you are prompted to pick a photo from your camera’s photo roll. Once you’ve picked your photo, you have five effect areas from which you can alter the photo: Black & White, Color, Diffusion, Grain, and Temperature. Each of these effects categories contain anything from 18 to 50 individual options for specific adjustments to be made.

For example, when choosing to adjust a image in the Black & White setting, you have more than 40 options from which to select (8mm, Old Newspaper, Sepia, and so on). From there, you can dig further in and make individual adjustments to each specific setting. With more than 170 presets — and the ability to adjust each individually — the possibilities are limitless.

For consumer-level users, the options are so broad that it could be a problem. For Digital Arts readers looking to mess about with their iPhone photos, it offers all the control you could wish for. There is, of course, the question of why you wouldn’t just use a computer if you needed that much adjustment control.

If you have the need to add a huge range of effects to an image while on the iPhone, Cool fx provides tons of options. (And it’s currently on sale for $1, as of this writing.) However, if you just want to tweak a few pictures every now and then, there are other apps out there that may feel less overwhelming.