GRAPHIC PROCESSING APPARATUS ALLOWING THE USER TO SPECIFY IMAGE APPEARANCE BY AUTOMATICALLY EXPRESSING DEFERENCES IN COLOR AND HATCHING ATTRIBUTES

A graphic processing apparatus is described which is capable of controlling the highlighting states of regions of an image by providing differences in color and hatching densities and the like to the regions in accordance with the area and the degree of importance of the region. This allows high quality coloring and hatching to be easily performed. The graphic processing apparatus has a memory for temporarily storing the image; a region extractor that extracts a plurality of regions to be painted with a color from the stored image; a region color determiner that determines region colors to be applied to the extracted regions; and an output image generator that generates an image having the color attributes applied to the extracted regions of the stored image. The region colors are differentiated from each other by differences in color attributes from among the regions in accordance with the areas of the individual regions each to be painted with a color. When used in a digital photocopier environment, an image that is scanned and stored in memory can have regions, selected by a user through a graphical user interface, colored or hatched, the colors/hatching applied at the same time to the regions and the modified image printed.