Phantasm CS

Phantasm CS is clever – bringing standard adjustment tools usually found in Photoshop directly into Illustrator. Effectively this means you can change the brightness and contrast, hue and saturation, and use dialogs such as Levels and Curves to adjust Illustrator vector graphics and embedded images.

You see, vectors are all well and good, but workflow can be hampered by colour selection and editing. Say you’ve created an object with a complex gradient mask, but after showing it to a client you realise the colours aren’t working. What do you do? Rasterise and take it into Photoshop for variations, and so on? Or change each colour-blend manually?

This is where Phantasm CS (silly name, we know) comes in. By using the Photoshop-esque dialogs for Levels, Curves and other adjustments, you can quickly alter the appearance of objects or groups of objects. Options enable you to specify if the effect is applied to fill or stroke (or, naturally, both), as well as ignoring spot colour, removing overprint and converting colourised bitmaps. One option – Safe CMYK – makes Phantasm CS automatically optimise ink levels after applying effects, and finally, Phantasm CS offers tools to easily select objects according to their appearance attributes – spot colours and RGB, CMYK and Gray bitmaps. A handy addition to Illustrator’s selection tools.

In short, for $37.50 (around £20), Phantasm CS is a great little plug-in. It has potential to seriously speed up your Illustrator workflow and offers a world of experimentation previously unavailable.