Users often want to use colour photographs for background images on their desktops, but photographs can make the desktop appear confusing because the photograph is too busy, or has too many colours, poor contrast with icons, etc. A nice feature to have would be an option to convert the picture to grayscale, and another to tint the grayscale image of the photo (using a colour picker dialog and graphics filters).
No, that's what GIMP/Photoshop is for. The brightness adjustment was one thing, but xfdesktop isn't an image editor.