Phantasm CS is a plug-in for Illustrator that will especially appeal to users who want to maintain a one-on-one relationship between the colour capabilities of Illustrator and Photoshop.

Phantasm CS can be used as a Filter or an Effect in Illustrator. The plug-in concentrates on colour entirely, and has options for saturation/hue, de-saturate, colour shift, levels and curves, and contrast and highlights. If you think these don’t make sense in Illustrator, you are like me: I thought so too, until I started working with it.

Working with Phantasm CS is no different from working with the equivalent features in Photoshop. Objects with a uniform colour fill and/or stroke don’t seem to benefit much from Phantasm CS. On the other hand, if, for example, you change the hue or apply a Shift to Color, a flat color will receive very noticable changes. But after playing around with it for a while, you soon discover that it can get worthwhile to have a colour plug-in that does the same like the identical features in Photoshop.

Colour changes are also possible on embedded bitmap graphics with Phantasm CS and these changes are also a direct equivalent of Photoshop’s functions and perhaps demonstrate best the extent to which Phantasm CS can alter Illustrator artwork.

Let there be Light!

An example for which Phantasm CS offers instant gratification: lighten colours by an amount that you can express in percentages. Just select the Hue/Saturation Effect or Filter and drag the Lightness slider to where you want it. There’s a Preview like in Photoshop’s real thing, so you immediately see the effect.

Another example is the Desaturate Effect/Filter. I wanted to use three Illustrator files as background for a LightScribe disc. The files were in colour, but LightScribe only knows about greyscale. To make sure the contrast would be to my liking, I ran Desaturate on the files with Gray Tone checked. The resulting drawings were correctly converted to greyscale, and I didn’t even have to fine-tune them for better contrast. They worked like a charm on the LightScribe coating.

Without Phantasm CS, I would have been busy with these files a lot longer. Phantasm CS makes processes such as these a lot easier, offering much more control than with Illustrator’s standard tools. And it offers the ability to perform the same kind of colour adjustments as in Photoshop --almost one-on-one. Almost, because some adjustments work out differently as Illustrator is vector-based and Photoshop bitmap-based.

Phantasm CS therefore brings standardisation to colour work in Photoshop and Illustrator, but only up to a point. There will always be differences, and even Phantasm CS can’t do much about that.