I would imagine you would HAVE to do this on an image by image basis. Can you elaborate a little bit on what exactly you're trying to do?

Thanks for the quick reply. We make 'things' out of different kinds of wood. I'm generating a website that I would like the peruser to be able to change the wood type and/or accessories with a mouse click in order to customize what we build (eg - change oak to cherry, change black iron handles for stainless steel, etc), thus allowing them to essentially 'build their own' before they place their order. I've seen this in many places online already, but folks don't seem to be putting up their software choices or even the name of their designers anymore.

Good examples of what I'm trying to do are on Toyota's new car website where you can change the color of the car or LL Bean's site where you can view women's shirts in various colors.

Thanks again for the input!

Lands' End also does this, it's a cool effect. I pretty certain it's an image by image color correction deal.

My advice, photograph each "thing" in a midtone color, then clean the image and crop it like you want it. Color correct to each stain/paint finish (WARNING: if you try to do this and you are not skilled at color correction, it will look fake. This should be left to the professionals )

As long as you don't change the dimensions or placement of your image, it'll look like the color is being applied to the "thing".

I got the hint Ovaltine , however, ....

There has to be something out "there" that exists to handle this. Between the car companies and the home improvment stores, it would have to take a very, very, very long time to cut out each piece of a room (cabinets, walls, floors, etc) in order to set it up so that a site visitor to change pieces of the scene individually, no?

Like I said, I'm just an ignorant newbie, so I'm taking it all in!
Thanks again.

Besides using Ovaltine's method, there really isn't anything that would automate this that I'm aware of. If you ever see this on a large scale site, chances are that not just one designer worked on the entire site, but a team of designers each with a different speciality, probably in-house, and one of them was/is assigned the lucrative duty of doing color correction on the product images. Sounds like it could be grunt-work for an intern or a newbie. It is a lot of work, and that's why we get paid to do what we do.