Yes I want exactly what you answered.
I was doing the duplicate approach, the problem is if I need to edit something, I need to redo all the duplicate thing again, and the two images has to have the exactly same size.
The effect I am doing is, you can change the color of the cars and I am using the slot colors for that, but not all the sprite are colored, there is some textures and rusty that doesn't change color, so I create a "rusty layer" and a "color layer".