This feels like a brain worm. Don’t get me wrong, I can appreciate and understand the desire to have something can could be hacked to backproject, but perhaps energy should be expended on specific tooling to achieve this facet.
Creative colour film pictures are not invertible. Black and white film are not invertible. X-Ray pictures are not invertible.
The idea that a picture can be “inverted” at all is part and parcel of a larger and suffocating conceptual framework. If I said “invert Starry Night” you’d bust out laughing at me, yet folks utter it with a straight face. Again, I’m not diminishing the desirability to be able to take a fully formed picture and hack / approximate an open domain tristimulus representation from it, but rather as a requirement over the ultimate goal, it is a fool’s errand of ahistorical nonsense.
Note that the idea of using some mythical “appearance” model goes very far back in history. In fact, Judd, Plaza, and Balcom made this very mistake in their 1950 Condon report^1; the seductive assumption that a picture is “ideal” when “reproduction” of the stimulus is achieved. They made the mistake of not doing their history apparently, and reading the work of Jones^234. Despite being focused on black and white formation of pictures, provided hints that the depth of picture-texts was more than a simulacrum of “standing there”. MacAdam smashed that idea to bits in 1951, as has been cited at this forum several times^5.
It may be interesting to note that Bartleson^678, whilst employed by Kodak, was clearly leaning away from a “conveyance of stimulus” in colour in pictures, researching memory colour trends.
At any rate, there is a massive history of attempts at understanding picture-texts that goes back over a century, with an even longer history if we look at psychology and philosophy.
All of that disappeared in a puff of smoke when the number fornicators of electrical sensors took over, as depressing as that is.
- Senate Advisory Committee on Color Television, E. U. Condon, Chairman, "Present Status of Color Television”, Judd, Plaza, Balcom, 1950.
- Psychophysics and Photography, Jones, 1944.
- Photographic Reproduction of Tone, Jones, 1921.
- On the Theory of Tone Reproduction, with a Graphic Method for the Solution of Problems, Jones, 1921.
- Quality of Color Reproduction, 1951.
- Memory Colors of Familiar Objects, Bartleson, 1960.
- Some observations on the reproduction of flesh colors, Bartleson, 1959.
- Color in memory in relation to photographic
reproduction, Bartleson, 1961.