Experimenting with the colour accent setting

I was in Bangalore for the last two weeks visiting my parents and attending the Durga Puja festival. During this period I took quite a lot of photos and played around with my Canon Powershot A630. A review of the camera had mentioned the colour accent feature, and I wanted to give this feature a serious try. This mode allows you to choose a colour, and all other colours are grayed out (as in a the above photo which has the colour red selected), kind like in many advertisements.

The mode is quite interesting and makes for some pretty different looking shots. This effect is of course possible by modifying regular photos through image editors as illustrated in this PC World article. You can really make your subject stand out with this effect (though I didn’t really focus on a single subject in most of the photos).

There’s also a colour swap mode that lets you switch one colour for another, but it does not work too well. So, what are your thoughts on such special effects? Have you experimented with them using your camera, or do you prefer to use image editors?

links for 2007-10-25