Need help with a photo issue

[vinayshaw]

Hello All,

I am new into the community and don't quiet know if this is a right place to post my query. I have Canon SD800 IS Digital ELPH camera (2GB mem) which I have been using since more then a year now. I was trying to copy the picture onto linux box, after copying (and while deleting the set in camera memory) my system crashed and I have gotten a lot of pictures like the one shown in sample here. I am not sure if its a camera issue or something gone wrong while copying the images. I copied the images from the following day and they didn't show any problems (and also with system crash), while opening the foto using GIMP photo editor I get a message "corrupt JPEG data: 7 extraneous bytes before marker 0xd9".
Appreciate if someone can guide me on what could this possibly be and how to fix these fotos.

Here's the link to sample foto
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vinaysh...11020/sizes/l/

Many thanks in advance,
Vinay

[Greg McCary]

The best place for this is in the help forum I am sure the Moderator can move it at some point, but yes the crash probably done it. It not really a good idea to ever connect you camera to the computer, even though I have been guilty of it. Crashes like that can damage memory cards and I have read about it damaging cameras too.
Instead get a cheap card reader and use that. I would reformat the card and give it another go. Just to see if your card is still good. The images on it now are probably toast.

[Medley]

A quick look at the Blue channel in this image indicates the lion's share of the problem:



In case you're not familiar, each color channel is essentially a grayscale (black and white) image with values ranging from 0 (black) to 255 (white). It takes 8 bits of information to be able to record 256 different values.

The bottom part of the blue channel contains only two values- black and white. This is represented by one bit of information. So it should be eight bits, but there's only one. Remember those "7 extraneous bytes"? Without that missing information, the blue channel is useless. There is no way to fix it. And without a blue channel, you'll likely never get a decent color image.

But all is not necessarily lost. If you're willing to put a bit of effort into it, you may still be able to salvage some black and white images. I converted your image to Lab mode, isolated the "Lightness" channel, selected the bottom half, duplicated it, and set the blend mode of the layer to "multiply" in Photoshop. This is the result:



There's still a bit of work involved to make it seamless, but it could definitely be done. It all depends on wether or not you think the images are worth it.

- Joe U.

[freygr]

You will need to recover the files from the memory card. The files on your box got corrupted. As long as you have not written to the memory card all you photos are recoverable with a file recovery program.