Scene7 provides an image authoring tool as part of their on-demand package. It allows us to create different color variations of a high quality image while preserving the texture and masking anything we don't want to recolor. The results look great, but it's not worth the $4,000 per year in subscription costs.
My questions is: does any other tool offer the same colorization capability?
I know about LiquidPixels' tool, but they're in the same ludicrous pricing range. Ditto Channel Advisor's Rich Image tool (formerly RichFX). These tools pretty much price out the small guy.
There's GIMP, but correct me if I'm wrong: it can't do the same things.
Certainly GIMP can be patched, maybe just scripted to do the same things. I don't know the Scene7 package you mention - from what you describe, it can certainly do the "different color variations of an image".
What scene7 could, and probably does have better than GIMP, are means for easily selecting unmutable image areas - however. However, if what there is today in GIMP don't fit you, at this price tag (around USD 4000.00) you can hire someone famuiliar with the code to implement your needed features.
Once they are implemented, they'd be, like the whole program, free software.