r.in.ascii r.out.ascii

[Anuj Bansal]

hi 
   i am trying to use r.out.ascii and r.in.ascii to convert a raster
image to ascii and back. i tried to convert a raster image to ascii 
and then the same image back to raster file but i seem to loose color
information. 

Also how can we extract the geographic information from a raw data 

Thanks in advance.