Harry,

So you get a washed out RGB image (JPG or PNG) when opened in Photoshop as RGB or placed into an RGB mode illustrator document?

Photoshop: I am not able to reproduce the issue in photoshop, can you provide more details?

Illustrator: When placing an RGB image into an RGB illustrator document, I cannot reproduce the original washed-out image issue. Can you provide more details?

Hi Lance,

I have run into this issue with both Photoshop and Illustrator (doc color mode in RGB) using both JPEGs and PNGs (both of which are in RGB space). Clearly the correct color code is coming in, because when I make a rectangle and use eyedropper to choose its color, it shows up as the correct color (nice and bright). I have never really used Bridge to be honest, but maybe a good time to start. These are just screenshots I am placing in illustrator to toss an icon on. Nothing elaborate. Can't recall having this much trouble in the past. All apps updated. Any help would be much appreciated.

Will do, thanks for the help!

Glad you got it sorted. If you happen to be creating art for eventual printing (digital or otherwise), consider:

1. Creating illustrator art and linked/embedded images in the same color space. it'll save you headaches like this in the future.

2. Synchronizing your color settings with something fairly standard (US web coated SWOP or a GRACoL2006 are pretty common) and embedding all color profiles when saving your linked images and parent documents. It'll save you and the prepress people at the print shop headaches due to mis-matched or missing color profile info.

I would like to note that the way you did it was technically alright, if you export/save PDF's for the print shop with a good PDF standard, or at least embed all color profiles w/o doing any color conversion. A modern RIP will handle CMYK vector data and RGB raster images just fine, but it will cause the images to look a little different in illustrator than in Photoshop/etc.

Hi Lance. I ended up figuring out what was wrong. The image I was uploading was RGB and Illustrator's Document Color Mode was set to CMYK. It was a dumb little mistake, but it was driving me crazy and I couldn't find anything about it on the internet. I finally found a YouTube video that showed me how easy it was to change.

Does this happen with all images or just certain types of images? Assuming not since you mention changing the image type doesn't affect it.(jpg vs png, etc)
Is the image in question in the same colors pace as the illustrator document? (CMYK vs RGB, etc)
Are your color management settings synchronized via Bridge? (illustrator using one CMYK profile while image may be a different one, etc)

Just covering the basics. I know it may sound like "have you turned it off and back on again?" nonsense but I always check the simple things first.