Question

I’m loading and saving out images with PIL just fine but I can’t seem to change the “overall” hue of a given image ~ google and here revealed an answer, sort of, with the numpy module, but thats not an option for me

It should be quite simple, given a gray image with alpha, I’d like to make it’s hue red

Answer 1

I think you want a mono-hue image. Is this true?

It’s not clear what you want done with the existing bands (alpha and greyscale/level). Do you want alpha to remain alpha and the greyscale to become red saturation? Do you want the alpha to become your red saturation? Do you want greyscale to be the image lightness and the alpha to become the saturation?

Edit:
I’ve changed the output based on your comment. You wanted the darkest shade of the greyscale band to represent fully saturated red and the lightest grey to represent white (in other words full-saturated with all colors). You also indicated that you wanted alpha to be preserved as alpha in the output. I’ve made that change too.

This is possible with some band swapping:

import Image
# get an image that is greyscale with alpha
i = Image.open('hsvwheel.png').convert('LA')
# get the two bands
L,A = i.split()
# a fully saturated band 
S, = Image.new('L', i.size, 255).split()
# re-combine the bands
# this keeps tha alpha channel in the new image
i2 = Image.merge('RGBA', (S,L,L,A))  
# save
i2.save('test.png')