Vampix provides a quick and easy way to create eye-catching colour splash-type effects.

It turns every part of an image to black and white, apart from the colour you select: blue eyes, a red rose, whatever it might be.

Load your target image and the program displays it alongside the preview window, which initially is just a greyscale version of the original.

Click on a colour within the original image, though, and the preview updates to show every pixel of that shade. If you've clicked on green trees in the background of a landscape scene, for instance, all similar pixels in the preview image will appear green, while everything else stays grey.

If this doesn't look quite right, clicking on a fractionally different shade updates the preview immediately. You can fine-tune the results by adjusting a threshold, too. Decreasing the threshold matches colours more accurately to your selection, displaying less colour overall; increasing the threshold extends the tolerance and gives you more of the original shades.

This works, but can be quite limited. You can only select a single colour, and there's no way to localise the effect. If you click on a blue sky, for example, any other pixel of that shade - water, clothing, whatever - will also be coloured in the finished image.

Still, this simplicity does keep the program easy-to-use, and it can deliver good results with the right image.