First off, let me say that I am definitely a novice. I'm mostly self taught- I did take some courses through the Art Institute of Pittsburgh but I had to drop out to take care of my family so I'm by no means an expert. So forgive me if I sound like an idiot.
Yesterday I was desiging images for my children and I was having difficulty with the colors- I would select a color from the color picker and a different shade/color would be applied to the text. Hoping it was a RAM issue, I just restarted my computer and it resolved itself. Easy enough. I completed the designs and went about my day.
Today, I'm working on a project for someone else and it's doing it again. I've restarted the computer and I've reset settings on Illustrator to the default but neither of these things resolved the problem.
In an attempt to make sure I wasn't going crazy, I took a screen shot of the text I'm attempting to color and the color picker box showing the color I was trying to choose. The selected color was R 6 G 6 B 249. I opened the image in paint and with the eyedropper tool selected the color that was actually applied and that color is R 61 G 93 B 171- so clearly not the same color at all. I then opened it in Photoshop to determine if it was an Adobe problem or just an Illustrator problem. With the eyedropper tool, I got the same results that I did in paint. Illustrator is definitely not applying the colors correctly.
Being a novice, I have no idea what to do now and as I'm using CS5, the live chat rep sent me here to seek help. I've been using these programs for years and have never encountered this problem so I'm baffled and I'd appreciate any help.