Colors! began its life as an homebrew DS application, where it quickly became one of the most popular homebrew apps. Its surprise success led to an iOS version, and now the program returns to a Nintendo platform in an official capacity with several neat new features in tow, including stereoscopic 3D. You can view the examples included in this article in 3D on your 3DS.

Colors! 3D isn't designed to be a full Photoshop replacement by any means. It is almost exclusively a painting program, and the simple interface is highly polished and easy to navigate. Users can alter the brush type, width, opacity, and color. The 3DS version makes great use of stereoscopic 3D, allowing users to paint on five different layers. The Circle Pad is used to zoom in and out. You can also take a photo with the 3DS camera and insert that into the layer of your choice, and paint over it.

Users can also collaboratively paint simultaneously over local Wi-Fi using the software's sharing feature. This action happens in real time, so you don't have to send an image back in forth.

One of the unique features on the DS was the use of the touch screen's pressure sensitivity to affect the heaviness of the paint strokes. This hardware feature is unavailable on the 3DS, but the developers have a solution: the D-Pad is used to toggle increased and decreased stroke opacity. I suggested using more unconventional, but fine-grained inputs, such as the volume slider, but it seems Nintendo wouldn't allow that. Apparently, the three-level toggle is sufficient for the primary use case, drawing lighter guide lines.

While you can save to SD card, one of Colors! 3D's best features is online sharing. Shared artwork will appear on their online gallery. Collecting Smiles will get to run their own gallery, so I imagine they'll be busy saving us from the Zach Millers of the world. However, Nintendo drew the line at cross-platform sharing, so shared artwork will be limited to those made in this version.

The application keeps track of all of your painting progress, and you can actually play back the entire drawing session, as well as any artwork downloaded from the gallery. This is definitely neat to watch, and you can even flip into a 3D side view and watch the paint applied over different layers. The painting playbacks can give novice users ideas for their own artistic development, and the animations can also be seen on the website.

Colors! 3D comes with a new coloring book feature, where users can fill in pre-made outlines without worrying about running over the lines. When colored, extra shading is automatically filled in, sometimes revealing little hidden secrets.

It may not be a game, but users should still get a lot of enjoyment out of the title. The stereoscopic capabilities as well as online sharing and playback makes Colors! 3D one of the more interesting artistic programs available on any platform.