Getting paint off of a previously saved image?

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Hey guys,

A friend sent me an image (a scanned photograph) with paint (a black box) on it, created in Microsoft's paint program. I've opened it in AppleWorks drawing/painting to try to figure how to get the paint layer off. When I use the eraser on the black box, it just creates white lines instead of showing the portion of the photo under the paint. (by the way, the friend can't find the individual image without the paint, or else I would ask him). Is there any hope/program I can use to lift the paint off and expose the photo underneath it?

Oh yeah, and I have a Mac OS X 10.4.11.

Thanks!

ETA: I'm also a university student and I think our library has access to some of the more expensive software, so if you know of anything at all that might help, please let me know.
 
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Microsoft Paint does not support layered file formats. That black area has replaced any image that was 'underneath' it, when it was applied.
 
thanks! I actually opened it in Picknik on Flickr and played around with some of the properties. I can actually see part of the photograph still underneath the box when I manipulate these properties (such as the RGB curves), so I thought there might be some hope but I guess not? Maybe I'm just seeing things, too!
 
Just to expand on what JeffCGD said -- the "black box" is now a part of the image, and it has replaced whatever pixels were there before. It may help to think that when using MS Paint, when you paint a color "over" another color or image, you're actually "replacing" the portion of the image that you're painting over -- not "layering" the new color on top of the old.

The short answer is that it is absolutely impossible to recover the original data (pixels) that used to be "under" that black box.
 
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