I was following this tutorial and saved about 4 minutes in to work on it later and when I re opened the blender file, my mesh had turned completely black. The loaded png in the UV editor had also turned black, although I was able to get the color version to appear in my UV editor window again, I was unable to figure out how to make the mesh go back to the color and patterns of the original png.
What tutorial ?
Was the texture an image file you opened or did you create it in blender ?
If you created it in blender, did you save the image file before saving blender?
Did you actually add the texture to the material or just opened it in the UV/Image Editor window ?