Selective Hue changing?

I dunno how else to describe it, but you know how you'll play some games that allow you to change the colour of a certain area on the character, a good example would be rise of the robots II, anyways, I've always wanted to be able to do this without having to create multiple instances of the character but with different colours.

It would be nice to say, set a colour/hue (i dunno how it works) range and then spin along the hue wheel at runtime till you get the colour you want.

I dunno if it's possible but it would save a whole lot of rendering time for me if it is <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_wink.gif" alt=";)" title="Wink" />

Setting a colour filter on a sprite can tint a whole object, so if you want to tint just parts of an image, you can use separate sprites for the areas to be tinted on top of the main sprite.