Proof of concept in taking an image of a cheap, red airsopft gun and attempting to make it look a bit more real.
What I did was take the original image of me holding the cheap red gun and pull it into Adobe After Effects CS4. I duplicated the layer anbd drew a quick mask (hence the reason it look slike the black version has a slight halo aroun dit) around the gun so that any colour correction on the gun from the bottom layer does not affect me and the background of the top layer.
I applied a desaturation and bit of colorization and then finished it off woth a levels adjustment to get a better match with the parts of the gun that are actually black. All inm all, not a bad job given that the entire process took about ten minutes.
Compare the two images below.
