My photo turns pink, green or purple from halfway down

The top of the photo looks right, and then, from one line down, everything has a pink, green, purple or very dark tint. The colours of your photo aren't lost. A small part of the file is missing, and everything after it starts from the wrong colour.

Why the colours go wrong

A JPEG photo is stored in small blocks, one after the other from the top left to the bottom right. To save space, each block doesn't store its own brightness and colour, only how much they differ from the block before: “a little brighter”, “a little more red”.

When a piece of the file is lost, the first block after the gap still says “a little more red than the block before”, but the block before is now a different one. So it starts from the wrong value, and every block after it follows. The whole rest of the photo is off by the same amount: a tint. The picture itself, the shapes and the detail, is still there.

Usually the same gap also shifts the rest of the picture sideways, because every block after it lands in the wrong place (more about that). And when a file has several gaps, every one starts a new tint: the photo gets stripes of different colours.

It isn't your screen

If your other photos look right, the file is damaged, not your screen or your photo viewer. Another program may show it a little differently, but it can't fix it.

Colour correction in a photo editor can make one tint a little better, but it works on the whole picture, it can't put shifted parts back, and saving throws away data that the repair needs. Keep the damaged file as it is.

How it is repaired

memories.repair finds where the data was lost, decodes every piece after a gap on its own, and finds the right starting colour for each piece: by comparing it with the small preview the camera stores inside every photo, or, when there is none, with the rows above it. It also puts each piece back in its place. The real picture data is kept; only the stretch that was really lost is filled in.

If a piece still looks a little off, the viewer has buttons to make it brighter or darker, bluer or yellower, redder or greener, one step at a time. The preview and these adjustments are free; you only pay to download the repaired photo.