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I have a large series of old JPEGs coming from an old harddrive. They are all perfectly wrongly colored. If I change them to Grayscale they look fine. I can not find out what effect or color error has occurred, but I would like the original color back.
Anybody has a clue what happened. It does not seem the same as what they call JPEG corrupted file.
I am not sure how to name this problem, so forgive me if the question has been asked and answered before.
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This isn't corruption in the normal way. It may be that the app which wrote them did something weird which it could also undo. Never seen this affecting a whole collection of images before.
It might be a simple colour mapping or it might be beyond hope. To have a guess, see if you can find any pictures with colours you were certain of. For example, a picture which should have a clear blue sky. A picture by a bright red truck. A picture of a lime green jersey. By knowing roughly what the colours SHOULD be someone may be able to make a suggestion.
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(To add: please post those few "reference" pictures and tell us EXACTLY what colour you believe they should show, and where).
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I found one that still has the original color, does that help?
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And another one
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That might help someone. I'm afraid it's beyond me, but what you've found could be really useful. Let's see what ideas other people have...
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Thanks for now. I just found out that the new Neural Filter 'Colorize' could do some magic, but it is still somewhat buggy.
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It appears that the incorrect version have been converted to CMYK mode with an embedded legacy custom CMYK ICC table/profile of SWOP (Coated), 20%. The damage has been baked into the image pixels, making possible recovery much harder than if this was an RGB image.
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Indeed. This weird solarization effect almost looks deliberate, like something people would play with back in the analog days. But the fact that there's a mystery CMYK embedded is the corpus delicti. Here's the cyan channel:
Obviously, you can't recover something like this without rebuilding it completely. Possible, maybe. Worth the effort? Only you can decide. That's a lot of manual labor.
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Thanks for this explanation and all for checking this. If it is embedded that's what it is.... sh*t happens. I did find the Neural 'Colorize' Filter though which does a good trick (no return to original colors though, but at least use-able)
Thanks again!