Canon SX 40HS: Color Accent

I just love every opportunity I have to play with my Canon SX40 HS and learn about all of its features.  A couple of days ago I checked out the color swap feature and today I am trying the color accent feature.  The color accent feature lets you choose one color that you wish to accent in your photo and it will revert the rest of the photo to black and white.  In the following example, you will see a not so exiting photo; a basket of fruit.  In the original shot you can see the yellow of the bananas, red of the apples, and some black, blue, and white in the background.

In the second shot, I chose to just keep the yellow from the bananas.  The rest of the photo is black and white except for a little bit by the stem of the apples which was similar to the the color of the bananas in the original shot.

In the third shot, I chose to keep the red color from the apples and the rest of the photo is now black and white.

What did I learn while experimenting with this mode?  My original shot was taken in Automatic Mode, and you can see that the exposure is much better than the other 2 pictures.  I think that when you change the mode dial to use the Color Accent feature, you are leaving Automatic Mode, but I could not tell how to compensate for this. ISO was on Auto, and I did not see any other settings that I could change in this mode.  I did learn, however, that you can use the up and down arrow keys to select the range of the color that you choose to keep.  You can also change the contrast of photos that you have already taken when in review mode using iContrast.  You get to choose from Auto, Low, Medium, and High, and the camera will save your edited photo as a new, separate shot. The following two photos were enhanced in this way using Auto iContrast.

I think this is a fun mode to play with, and when you have a subject that would lend itself to this mode, you can get creative.