This paper presents a new artificial intelligence-based method to address the following problem: given an initial digital image (source image), and a modification of the image (mod image) obtained from the source through a color map and visual attributes assumed to be unknown, determine suitable values for color map and contrast such that, when applied to the mod image, a similar image to the source is obtained. This problem has several applications in the fields of image restoration and cleaning. Our approach is based on the application of a powerful swarm intelligence method called bat algorithm. The method is tested on an illustrative example of the digital image of a famous oil painting. The experimental results show that the method performs very well, with a similarity error rate between the source and the reconstructed images of only 8.37%.