Photo Gallery Help

I have my whole layout and functionality between thumbnails and photos… what I want is for when you click a thumb, an image loads, and the image loads animated from overexposed to normal… now I know I could create a white box over the image and slowly fade to 0 alpha, but on a few site it seems like the actual image colors are being effected. Is this a scripting technique? do I animate the image mc? not sure if this makes sense, but any help would be good