Can Illustrator lighten/darken photos?

Go old school. Place a box on top of the photo filled with white (or another color or even a gradient) and use transparency/blending mode to allow the photo to show thru in an edited way.  You'll be surprised how much control you'll have. Using effects/svg can be a bit unpredictable if you are heading to print. 

I figured out a different way to lighten up objects, placed or vectors. Place a shape using the pen tool or shape tool, make the fill white and in the opacity options on the shape. You then change the blending mode to lighten and change the opacity to your desired lightness. I hope this helps someone out there Googling like me.

I have found a way to lighten photos in Illustrator. Select the image you want to lighten. EDIT- EDIT COLOURS - ADJUST COLOUR BALANCE - select this. Move all of the little arrows over to the left by the same value- I have just lightened a Spiderman pic I got off Google that was printing out too dark. I moved all the arrows to the left by 20% and it prints out  now like I have used the 'brighten' feature in Photoshop. The colour vibrancy is maintained and it doesn't look washed out like adding a white mask does! The percentage you change it by depends on how dark your image is to start with, so you will need to have a little play around with the %. Hope this helps others- it's taken me a while of frustration to find this answer- I used to take all my imaged into Photoshop which was a pain.

The short answer is no.

There are a couple ways to just lighten them, sort of, though. It's really just a white wash. So you're adding a white object with a screen mode on top of it.

One way is to do just that. Add a white object right on top of your image. But then if you change the scale/shape/mask it, then you have to deal with 2 objects.

So option 2, a better option, is to add the "inner glow" effect. Choose the from center option and set blur to zero. It should be set to screen mode by default, and will preset to something like 70%. You'll probably want to start closer to 20 and work +/- from there. To darken an image, it's the same tool. Just change the mode to multiply, and change it's color to black. You're making an inner shadow, but since it's Really the same exact tool, Adobe didn't feel the need to add it, or to change the name to something like Inner Glow/shadow, which might help a bunch of people out when trying to find inner shadow. Then again, Adobe is Terrible when it comes to consistency between software. AfterEffects doesn't even have inner shadow. It's built in as an option to drop shadow. And it has outer glow, not inner glow. Inner glow is done through the drop shadow option if you need it. They should Probably have a cross program manager overseeing these things to help with consistency. Especially since they are trying to force Everyone to buy  rent the master collection.

Yes, AI has some basic adjustment filters inherited from PS and of ycourse you can use blending modes to achieve specific colorization effects. Just be aware that this stuff will always affect the whole image and you cannot easily limit it with selections and masks...

Mylenium