Check to see if you had a spot channel in your grayscale image, that would do this.

Well the tiff settings should not make a difference (compression, byte order), nor would 16-bit. I do not believe a corrupted color profile or an illegal character in the filename would either.

The only other thing I can think of is if you had stroke in focus rather than fill when you assigned color. Sorry, but if your channels palette only had grayscale, I can't come up with anything better on this.

Prepress,

I am having this exact same issue right at this second. My issue is that I can't seem to fix it either! I have a file with a placed greyscale PSD and it's colorizing in Illustrator. I place a different image in the same file, it won't color. Because this is an unrelated file to the one that is working, I can't seem to fix the issue. So, yes, someone else is having your issue... and it's damn annoying. Hopefully a solution will present itself soon. I'm pretty sure this used to be a standard thing to do - I've done it years ago without issue.

Are you certain that the image is in fact greyscale and not desaturated RGB.

My camera can take "black and white" pictures but they are RGB all the same, not single channel.

I concur, Illustrator will only let me colorize a linked grayscale image if the file has a background layer. This would prevent being able to apply color to an image that has a transparent component to it from within Illustrator, you would instead have to do this though photoshop.

I found this in Illustrator's help on how to colorize 1 bit or grayscale images.

So if your grayscale image has transparency (i.e. an alpha channel) you can only colorize it with a spot color inside Illustrator. If you need to colorize with process it sounds like you will need to do that image into Photoshop.

Hey I Sailer,

I would agree with this, however I can't seem to replicate what has already worked for me. And the file that I have placed with a transparent background that does seem to work for me allows me to colorize it with anything - spot or process.

I wish Adobe would weigh in on this... I mean, it is their forum and their product... LOL

So to reiterate, I have a PSD file, greyscale mode, type (black) on a transparent background - no extra channels. Place this psd into Illustrator, it asks if I want to 'flatten' or 'maintain layers'. I say flatten, and it shows up as my black type with no (transparent) background. I then select the swatches, hit a color, and boom - black type is now 'x' color.

I have a bunch of files like this - all work.

I tried to duplicate this lately with something else, and I can't. It just doesn't seem to work now... no idea why. When I open the old file that does work up to see the settings, there is no different. Strangeness for sure.

Place the flattened grayscale tiff in Illustrator. Select it with the Direct Selection tool - click on the color palette for None. Then click the spot color (or other color swatch) you want.

It works for me - though I rarely have to color tifs in Illustrator this way. THis ugly business card came in designed in 2 spot colors. I had to change the cpot color for the blue from one PMS to the other.

I eventually managed to do it! Even though adobe says it can't be done. As long as its a grayscale tiff and its flattened not layered. It works!!