Thanks. Steve.
I saw the image, and saw that there was an easy answer.
Is your link to John's post in your Post #5, the answer then?
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Rik - my personal preferred solution for more than two shades is to set photoshop as my bitmap editor in xara options :D
but if you want to do it in xara then the mehdi does work quite well - sometimes the 'eraser genuine' [free from mehdi site] works better than the classic
be interesting to see how useful the new eraser feature is in this respect in version 9 [the version 8 colour select/erase is not as good as photoshop IMO]