Shades of grey to shades of a colour.

Greeting from sunny Penzance,

Is there a way to change shades of grey into shades of a colour?

I’ve been experimenting with the commands “Select colours to enhance” and “Photo hue” and have managed to change orange to blue for the selected tool ( see attached ), but this method doesn’t seem to work for shades of grey ?

I guess because grey is not a “colour” ?

I would like black to remain unchanged and white to be fully saturated red and in-between shades of grey to become in-between shades of pink.

I also looked at transparency modes but couldn't see a solution.

Grayscale is 0% saturated which means as you have deduced, there is no color.

true grey shades in the HSV colour model have Hue=0 and Saturation=0 and Value ranges from 0 which is black to 255 which is white - you can see this in the colour editor

the vaule of H determines the actual hue [colour] and S determines the saturation, ie how much of that hue is present; some greys can have a slight amount of saturation that can make them 'warm' or 'cool'

it is a complicated ask

you would have to define the hue you wanted and the saturation range relative to the luminosity of greys [how 'light/dark' they are]

xara is not really the program to do this in as it does not have HSL color space, and it is not a one step process, it is a recolouration exercise in it's own right

leaving all the theory aside though - have you tried just selecting everything and applying pink from the colour line

technically its a hack, but it might be close enough for you ?

sometime we can overthink these things

you will loose the white and black though so you'd have to fix that... or not select it