Help with images losing colour

[danilou74]

Hi,

I loaded some images from my camera onto my laptop last night. They automatically opened in IrfanView, as it's my default viewer. I saved them onto a memory stick as jpgs and when I went to use them today, they've gone black&white. The odd thing is, the thumbnails are in colour, but when you open the files, they're black & white. I checked the FAQ and saw the question there about this problem, but my Properties does not have the 'Load as greyscale' option ticked. These are really important pictures and are now deleted from my phone. can anyone help??

UPDATE: I've just tried saving another picture to see what happened and, even though it's not ticked in the Properties menu, as I mentioned above, the 'save as grayscale jpg' was ticked! I didn't notice that when I saved all those pics last night. Is there any way of recovering the colour???

Thanks
Dani

[Bhikkhu Pesala]

The short answer is, “No.” The long answer isn't any better.

[danilou74]

Bugger. Thanks, anyway.

[Laurent]

Hi danilou74,

Something sounds strange: thumbnails are in coulour? I tried to save a JPEG as grayscale image and its thumbnail is grayscale too. Can you post here one of these grayscale images with a coulour thumbnails?

As I understand, your images were in three different places: your camera, your laptop hard drive, and your memory stick. Don't you have still the original images somewhere? (Have also a look into the trash).

Laurent

[rashers]

You could recover the originals from your camera even if they've been deleted. There are a few (free) recovery programs available. I think the name of one is simply Recover. But if you Google for 'data recovery program' or 'deleted files recovery' something should come up.

If you have no luck get back to me and I'll try to help as I've had to recover deleted files fairly recently.

[Sam_Zen]

One of those freebies is Restoration.

Crucial to recover files :
~ No action after the deletion, or as less as possible, on the medium or partition which has the target files.
~ So, inevitable, don't install the recovery program on the same medium.
Reason :
Even if a file has been deleted from the trashbin, the bytes are still there. It's just that the system has declared this (HD-)space free, to be used by other applications, to write some data there.
The more has been done on the same medium, after the accidental deletion, like taking more pictures with the camera, will increase the risk that this 'free area', or part of it, will be overwritten by something else. So recovery becomes impossible.
Most recovery apps will have built-in indicators to show the chance of full recovery.

This recovery possibility of files of the past, has, obviously, on it's turn led to the development of tools to prevent this.
With the option, after delete, to 'scramble' the bytes of the file with some formula. It's often called 'bleaching'.