And lo on Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:31:59 +0100, Jim Henderson  
<nos### [at] nospamcom> did spake, saying:

> On Thu, 24 Jul 2008 20:24:51 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>
>>>> I meant you can't just give a machine a BW picture of a tree and have
>>>> it automatically know to turn it green. That's impossible.
>>>
>>> I don't know that to be the case.  Again, a case of one's ability to
>>> fathom how something like that is done doesn't translate to "there's no
>>> way it could possibly be done".
>>
>> It's a basic premise of signal processing that you cannot recover data
>> that isn't there any more. Shannon's theorum and all that.
>>
>> Whether you can *fake* something that "looks" right is another matter.
>> But *recover*? No. Impossible.
>
> At least as far as we know today.

If the grains in the film reacted to colour in some currently unreadable  
fashion and/or those alterations were transferred to the photo itself then  
you could, in theory, recover colour from a B&W photo or film by reading  
those imperfections.

-- 
Phil Cook

--
I once tried to be apathetic, but I just couldn't be bothered
http://flipc.blogspot.com

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