Recolouring an Image

[jimkirk363]

If an image has been changed to black & White\Greyscale, is it then possible to change it back to colour again?

Thanks everyone for your time.

[LeviFiction]

I suppose that depends on what you mean and how it was done, but in general, no.

In PSP most effects that convert to B&W are destructive, throwing away the color and converting them to pure light value. If you go Image -> Greyscale it both throws away color and decreases the color depth from RGB to just V so it's 1/3rd the size. If you then increase the color depth to full 8-bit RGB the color won't come back because it's already been lost. You can paint with color to simulate the original colors, but the actual colors are gone.

Same thing with Effects -> Photo Effects -> B&W Film Effect - This simulates putting a color filter in front of the lens making it darker and the opposite colors lighter again a destructive edit tossing out color and replacing it with RGB grey equivalent based on your choices.

If you use the HSL Adjusment Layer setting Saturation to 0, that's non-destructive. All layers underneath the adjustment layer will be desaturated but only while under the layer, turn off the adjustment layer, or move the layers from underneath it and they regain their color appearance because the adjustment layer doesn't actually change anything on the layer itself. If you save as PNG or JPEG then all of that data is lost after the image is flattened. You have to save in PSPImage format or PSD format to retain the layers and be able to continue editing the image.

There are AI tools online that were trained to simulate color photos given a B&W image. But these are just approximations and aren't the actual colors of the original image.

Quick note: if you use a monochrome setting in your camera and your camera retains RAW files, the RAW data will still have all of the color information but the JPEG from the camera won't.

So, like I said, it all kind of depends on how you made an image B&W, but in general the answer is no. Once you've tossed out the color to make it B&W the color is gone.