: How to remove color while leaving gradients intact I was looking at this page, which is a demo allowing the user to choose the colors of certain parts of a motorcycle. It struck me that while

@Bryan765

Is this what you were meaning to do? I downloaded your pic that you gave and did a little painting on it with gimp 2.8. If this indeed what you are wanting to accomplish then it's quite simple, go to the painting tool of your choice pencil, paint-brush or air-brush. In the tool options box at the top above the brush size you will see normal, click that then at the bottom of the list is color and hue. Color mode is what I used for your picture, the hue mode will only color over other colors with another hue, and will color over pretty much anything except for solid white and solid black. So if you use hue mode on a black, gray or white area it will have no effect at all. I hope that my answer was helpful to you.

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@Berryessa866

There is no need to manually recreate anything by hand. You can simply use the image as an alpha mask to replace the areas you want with transparency. Let me show you a quick example using another image.

Take the following image (taken from here and converted to black & white).



Using the technique I describe here I use the image as an alpha mask on itself.



Then we can mask off the areas we want to keep transparent and overlay the original image.



Then by placing a solid color behind we can change the color of the transparent areas.



You can use two masked layers to control the shadows and highlights independently.

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