Color Swap
How I became obsessed with a goofy gimmick
In the early 2000s, several different Canon digicams began shipping with a novelty feature called Color Swap. The feature allows the user to “transform a color specified in the LCD monitor into another”. While I have a vague memory of playing around with novelty features like Color Swap and its sibling Color Accent back when these cameras first came out, probably most people, myself included at best considered it a goofy thing to play around with for a few minutes and then forget about. Fast forward to 2024 when I stumbled upon a reddit post by user u/raakkillie, in the subreddit r/VintageDigitalCameras. They posted a series of really intriguing urban landscapes with red, turquoise and purple skies. It didn’t seem gimmicky at all. I was reminded of LomoChrome Turquoise and Purple or even Kodak’s color infrared film, Aerochrome. I really wanted to try my hand at in camera Color Swapping. After a little digging, I realized that a digicam in my possession, the Canon SD1400 IS, had this feature and after a bit more digging, I figured out how to turn it on and gleefully started playing with the feature.
Obviously, color swapping in post is a pretty simple edit. But there is something uniquely compelling about using the feature in real time. I’ll admit it, I’m having way more fun with this goofy little feature than I expected. Do you have any cameras with Color Swap? Are there any other quirky, novelty features hiding in the menu options that you secretly love? If so, I love to hear about it in the comments section below.