Methods and devices for selectively highlighting one or more regions of arbitrary shape on a display. The method for creating highlight effects in multimedia data (data including video and/or graphics, for example) includes the steps of receiving a video and/or graphics data stream from an input source; performing an arithmetic operation upon at least one color component value of constituent pixels of the data stream that are to be hightlighted to provide a selectively highlighted video and/or graphics data stream; and outputting the selectively highlighted video and/or graphics data stream directly to a display. The arithmetic operation may include addition or subtraction. Because the original multimedia data in memory is not modified or copied in order to create the highlight effects, both memory bandwidth and area are saved. Moreover, once highlighting is turned off, the original (non-highlighted) data may be immediately re-displayed.