I had some images given to me that were going to be loaded at run-time in Flash. No problem. I’ve done that hundreds of times. But this time I got some weirdness that took a while to figure out.

Here’s the image in standard RGB:

Nothing wrong there.

Now here’s the same image using CMYK.

One thing you might notice is that it’s much darker than the RGB, unless your browser corrects for it. It’s also WAY bigger in file size. The top image is only 13k. The same in CMYK is 587. I’ve never worked in CMYK so this is all new to me.

Now here’s the really strange part.

This is a screen capture of the image after it was imported in Flash.
WTF? So this is what I saw when I loaded the images. I went to the artist who saved these images out and noticed the CMYK on the titlebar in Photoshop.

So, if you ever get something like this you know what caused it.