Man!

I am bit of a Freehand die hard user and now that freehand is no more, Illustrator has just been a bit of a nightmare!

The one thing that I use to use often in Freehand is:
Importing a grey scale tiff and in the Inspector tool box, under obect, one had a option to make the image 'transparent' (in other words.... you could place any colour on top of the image and it would go that colour, but at the same time remove the back ground colour. so ou could place it intop of anything and it would look like a vector (iesh) graphic

I am working with Illustrator CS2 is this possible?
if so please tell me how.

PLEASE!!!!!!!

you can has transparency!

do the same thing... place an image, then make a colored object(box, circle, star, etc...)
put the object on top of the image and then open your Transparency tab(Window >> Transparency)
and just like photoshop ya have the same blending options..well not all of then. change it to Color or whichever ya choose.

hi
Thanx for that

However, i must be doing something wrong because its not working..... I have tried so many other things.

Once i import a grey scale tiff even psd file and place the colour over that(and do as you said), it just goes black and the colour is just not visable.

what could i be doing wrong..... i am pulling my hair out....

heres a quick sample of using a color filter/layer/transparency/thing on top of it. if the imported photo is on top then youll get the black. if the color is on top you ll get the color.

Select the color object(square)
then Object >> Arrange >> Bring to Front

Try saving your image as a bitmap tif, with as much resolution possible, place into Illustrator, change the foreground colour.