Is it possible to change the look of an ImageIcon? (grey it out)?

Question

I'm making this card game. Ive got a sequence of cards (the player hand) in a JLayeredPane and theyre displaying nicely. Theyre displaying just as the card look in microsoft hearts. Ive added mouselisteners to all of the cards and what I want to happen is when a card is clicked (pressed and not released) I would like to modify the imageIcon in some graphical way so as to indicate that the card is being selected. Preferabbly by the card going dark, grayscale.
Is there any possible way to do this? if so how would this be done?
I know how to implements the mouselisteners etc. I need help withthe imageIcon image specifically. There does not seem to be any method for ImageIcon which does what I need.

Answer 1

Here's a quick demo. It's a one-line operation.
import java.awt.*;
import java.awt.color.*;
import java.awt.image.*;
import java.net.*;
import javax.imageio.*;
import javax.swing.*;
public class Test {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        EventQueue.invokeLater(new Runnable(){
            public void run() {
                launch();
    static void launch(){
        try {
            URL url = new URL("http://blogs.sun.com/roller/resources/jag/SouthParkJAG-small.png");
            BufferedImage image = ImageIO.read(url);
            ColorSpace csGray = ColorSpace.getInstance(ColorSpace.CS_GRAY);
            BufferedImage gray = new ColorConvertOp(csGray, null).filter(image, null);
            display(image, gray);
        } catch (Exception e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
    static void display(Image... images) {
        JPanel cp = new JPanel();
        for(Image image : images) {
            cp.add(new JLabel(new ImageIcon(image)));
        JFrame frame = new JFrame ();
        frame.setDefaultCloseOperation (JFrame.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        frame.setContentPane(cp);
        frame.pack();
        frame.setLocationRelativeTo(null);
        frame.setVisible(true);
}This just converts to grayscale with making it look "disabled" -- washed out.